Dezeen has been running a design competition with LG for novel uses of LG’s OLED display technologies. One entry in particular caught my attention: Gianfranco Vasselli’s concept for integrating an OLED display into a “shelf” arrangement over a bed.

I love the integration of lighting and digital media into what would have been an unremarkable architectural surface (the bottom side of a shelf). I love the intention that this is the first thing someone sees in the morning when they wake up, the last thing they see before they go to bed, and all the creative potential that offers in dramatically improving the quality of a person’s daily experience via a properly designed mix of melanopic response and artistic content.

The fact that there is no conceptual or technical difference between this piece as a digital display or a lighting fixture is really the future. All light sources are pixels – and all pixels are light sources. We must design our built environments for this future.

I’m a bit surprised the obvious bedroom nature of this – wink, wink – was not more fully elaborated/sensationalized. Romance could be driven through content as simple as video of a fireplace, artistic as something like the work of Marco Brambilla, or of course, something more blatantly lascivious….after all, think about the history of the market adoption of VHS!