dubai fountain
WET Design, the designers and fabricators of the most bad-ass fountains ever, have a snazzy new full-screen Flash website that includes a new video of the Dubai Fountain. 6,600 submerged lights, 25 color projectors, hundreds of submerged robotically-controlled nozzles and enough compressed … Continue reading dubai fountain
Luminous Ceilings
Here’s a fantastic slide show of illuminated ceilings throughout history. Modern-era projects start at about 2:30 into the video. “The aesthetic of luminous ceilings: From the image of heaven to dynamic light.” By Thomas Schielke, via Arch Daily. Continue reading Luminous Ceilings
“less or else” is becoming a bore
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
la rinascente – top floor
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.
hard rock cafe interactive memorabilia wall
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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acuity brands: OLED group in the works
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:
tent digital london: a video from Core77
Check out Core77’s coverage of the Tent Digital show in London. There is a very cool video showing a variety of interactive video and lighting effects. Continue reading tent digital london: a video from Core77
mark braun: pyrus lamp
Mark Braun is a Berlin designer who has recently shown a molded pulp-paper lamp shade at several design shows.
I love how it looks like concrete, yet is thin and light enough to be used as a shade. This another great example of sustainable biomass materials in light fixtures.
jing restaurant
seeper
Seeper is a UK-based design firm focusing on multi-touch control installations. You really just have to check out their website and watch the videos…dazzling stuff! Continue reading seeper
interlam wall panel systems
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.
freedom of creation
Freedom of Creation is an Amsterdam firm that has explored rapid manufacturing techniques for nearly a decade. FOC launched a series of decorative light fixtures that push the possibilities of the technology: Their pendants, surface mounted fixtures, and table lamps have rich, highly sculptural, biomorphic shapes.
philips lumiblade
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.
howeler yoon architecture
Howeler Yoon Architecture of Boston has produced several concepts and installations that explore very unique and innovative applications for lighting. Continue reading “howeler yoon architecture”
litracon: light transmitting concrete
LiTraCon is a combination of optical fibers and concrete. The optical fibers are aligned parallel with each other and perpendicular to the surface, passing the exact light pattern that falls on the outer surface through to the inner surface.
thin-film light sources
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.
large scale, multi-touch interactive displays
Multi-touch control systems, popularized by Apple’s iPhone, and gesture recognition systems, such as the dazzling computer interface that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report, are slowly-but-surely becoming commonplace technology. And these üeber control technologies are finding their way into architectural applications.
Continue reading “large scale, multi-touch interactive displays”
blade runner for real: kumho asiana headquarters
1982’s Blade Runner vividly depicted a dystopian future for Los Angeles 2019. Back in 1982, massive multi-story video screens on the sides of buildings were extremely far-fetched sci-fi, something only the film industry could visualize.
Well, the future has arrived right on time. Skyscraper-sized video screens are now available, even common. Sorry, no flying cars or humanoid replicants just yet…but hey, there are still ten years to go until 2019.
The Kumho Asiana Group Headquarters in Seoul, South Korea opened in 2008 with a massive 15m x 94m low-res exterior video screen using Element Labs Versa Ray. What struck me was how close the above image resembled the famous shot from the movie.
Continue reading “blade runner for real: kumho asiana headquarters”
cloud lamps by jordy fu
Yu Jordy Fu is a British designer and artist that has a collection of gorgeous cut-paper lanterns for sale.
corian: not just your countertop anymore
Dupont, with their Corian line, has seemingly done more in the past few years to promote creative new approaches to lighting than any of the major lighting conglomerates.
Corian has a few major advantages: Its malleability allows it to be formed in a myriad of shapes and continuous surfaces; its durability and repairability allow it to be used a primary finished surface; and its translucency allows designers to integrate lighting features seamlessly into surfaces.
Lucept 