Author: Brad Koerner

Creative Director and Product Manager
Future Lighting

Lighting Inspiration: Tron Legacy

Brad Koerner

Disney has been promoting its Tron reboot for what seems like several years at this point.  I’m not a sci-fi geek, but this movie has caught my attention for its crazy, intrinsic use of lighting effects to achieve the movie’s overall aesthetic.

My contention has been that the future of lighting is clear:  just look to past sci-fi movies to see what the environments of the future will look like.  Star Wars and Blade Runner are two prime examples of environmental lighting visions that have already come to pass.

Continue reading “Lighting Inspiration: Tron Legacy”

Lighting TechnologyLeave a comment

gaga for zhaga

Brad Koerner

In the realm of plain ol’ white light, there is a desperate need in the industry for basic standardization of LED lamp modules.  This would be akin to ye olde Edison screw base…but the 2010 version.  Without such standardization, the adoption rate of LED technology for general illumination will be stifled.  Who wants to install expensive fixtures that use flavor-of-the-month LED technologies, custom circuit boards and drivers, non standard geometries, and “disposable” non-relampable fixture designs.  Most specifiers that I’ve spoken with certainly don’t want to…and that is why you are not seeing many projects using LEDs for general illumination, even though the LEDs … Continue reading gaga for zhaga

Business & Innovation

the problem with reps and distributors

Brad Koerner

This a great quote, nicknamed “The Shirky Principal,” attributed to Clay Shirky. “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” If lighting reps (or better yet, the actual manufacturers) simply posted lighting costs and markups openly, poof…no more reps. If lighting manufacturers simply took money directly from…OMG…the actual customer, there would be no more need for wholesale distributors. Continue reading the problem with reps and distributors

Future Lighting

sculpture + projection = awesomeness, part two

Brad Koerner

Yet another sculpture + projection installation: Designboom has a post on installation called “Morphology“, which employs simple white cubes as projection surfaces.  Melbourne artist Kit Webster projects extraordinary digital kaleidoscope effects on the cubes, some of which really distort visual space perspective in amazing ways.  The video … Continue reading sculpture + projection = awesomeness, part two

Future Lighting

sculpture + projection = awesomeness

Brad Koerner

Core77 posted an installation called “Augmented Sculpture” by German artists Grosse8 and Lichtfront. Consisting of an angular wooden sculpture surrounded by four precisely registered video projectors, Lichtfront seamlessly projects a dazzling sequence of patterns onto the sculpture. These guys should get T-shirts made up that say: “Trigonometry rocks my world!” Continue reading sculpture + projection = awesomeness

Lighting EducationLeave a comment

SEED Magazine: The Evolution of Illumination

Brad Koerner

SEED Magazine has an interesting piece on bioluminescent organisms. One paragraph in particular reads like Mother Nature’s version of interactive lighting control: “Their lights have a variety of purposes: Camouflage, attracting mates, attracting (or distracting) prey have all been observed. In animals with nervous systems, in most cases, neural activity initiates the bioluminescence. But in the velvet belly lantern shark, Lynn says, researchers found that the glowing was not caused by nerve cells. Instead, it seemed, certain hormones controlled the glow: Melatonin and prolactin turned it on, and a hormone called Alpha-MSH turned it off. This makes some sense, as … Continue reading SEED Magazine: The Evolution of Illumination