Author: Brad Koerner

Creative Director and Product Manager
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

Future LightingLeave a comment

“less or else” is becoming a bore

Brad Koerner

Editor’s Note:  You may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything in the past month.  This is because I took an exciting new job and my family and I moved across country.  Needless to say, I’ve had zero time for blogging. My new position is Senior Marketing Manager – LED Systems at Micron Technologies.  Never heard of Micron?  Don’t worry…if you are in the lighting industry, I’m sure you will in the next year.  Micron is a huge manufacturer of memory chips and other semiconductor products, and is launching a new line of LED products. But more on that later.  For … Continue reading “less or else” is becoming a bore

Cool ArchitectsLeave a comment

la rinascente – top floor

Brad Koerner

La Rinascente Milan 1

Ooohhh….aaaahhh….Italians have such style.  While we Americans get to shop under acres of the cheapest 2×4 acoustic ceiling tiles that our department stores can procure from the lowest bidder, the department store La Rinascente in Milan is a showpiece of design.

ArchDaily has a great piece on the new top floor snack shop/restaurant, equipped with gorgeous translucent panels backlit either naturally by skylights above or fluorescent lighting at night.

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Interactive LightingLeave a comment

hard rock cafe interactive memorabilia wall

Brad Koerner

Hard Rock Cafe Multi-Touch_1255527873319

Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas recently unveiled a massive 18′ wide by 4′ tall rear-projection, multi-touch, multi-user interactive wall for showcasing its rock’n’roll memorabilia collection.  Developed by Obscura Digital, a San Fransisco-based “digital design and technology marketing agency,” the wall uses three 1920 pixel HD projectors along with some serious graphics processing power to render a huge number of images and video clips with live multi-touch manipulation.

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Future LightingLeave a comment

acuity brands: OLED group in the works

Brad Koerner

Sometimes, the best way to figure out what a company is really doing is to monitor their job postings.

As further proof that OLED’s are finally nearing some form of commercial use, Coroflot has an interesting job posting for an industrial designer at Acuity Lighting:  Senior Product Designer – OLED Product Design Center.

In case the link doesn’t stay put, following is the job description:

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Creative ManufacturersLeave a comment

interlam wall panel systems

Brad Koerner

interlamTOUCH

You know you want to:  Go ahead, reach out and touch the walls.

Interlam is a Virginia-based fabricator of three-dimensional, cut-to-order wall panels.  Using thick sheets of various fiberboard products, they CNC router-cut panels with a variety of patterns of varying depth and relief.    It is really amazing the impact one new tool, such as large-format CNC router tables, can have on the abilities of designers to infuse their spaces with new forms of visual richness.

All of these products are complemented nicely with linear grazing light sources, positioned just a few inches off the surface, such as Color Kinetics’ Graze fixture or Focal Point’s Mini-Grazer.

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Creative Manufacturers, Future Lighting, Interactive LightingLeave a comment

philips lumiblade

Brad Koerner

hannesKoch_bulb2_650

Lumiblade is Philips first major foray into commercial OLED products.

In short, Philips is really just selling sample kits right now for design explorations.  The samples are expensive, not very efficient (20 lm/w), and with only 10,000 hours at 50% dimmed output, the lifetime isn’t that great.

However, it is promising to see a technology that has been in development for over a decade finally, even if just tentatively, reach some level of commercial potential.

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Creative Manufacturers, Future Lighting, Lighting TechnologyLeave a comment

thin-film light sources

Brad Koerner

continua-light_hp_sfondo1

Thin-film light sources have been around for awhile, despite how futuristic they seem to be.  Their adoption has been relatively slow for two reasons:  First, they have fairly limited light ouput, which restricts them to mostly decorative applications.  Second, they are more difficult to implement in architectural designs, usually requiring a lot of custom design.  Not that that are difficult to use…they are just not as simple-minded and quick as copying yet another downlight symbol on a reflected ceiling plan.  Lifetime varies, depending on how bright they are driven, which is another consideration.

Yet still, the opportunity for creative new explorations of lighting is obvious, such as our previous post on a concept for light emitting wallpaper.

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