We pointed out just last week that moaning about CFL lighting is only a short term pleasure for those who can think disaster instead of opportunity at the end of the Edisonian, incandescent age, because LED and more interestingly OLED lighting is the way forward.
Article today in the NY Times highlights as it were, the attraction of OLED not only for industry, but for designers:
But unlike LEDs, which provide points of light like standard incandescent bulbs, OLEDs create uniform, diffuse light across ultrathin sheets of material that eventually can even be made to be flexible.Ingo Maurer...If you make a wall divider with OLED panels, it can be extremely decorative. I would combine it with point light sources,” he said.
Other designers have thought about putting them in ceiling tiles or in Venetian blinds, so that after dusk a room looks as if sunshine is still streaming in.
And the roll out of the flexible lights isn't so far away:
Within a year, manufacturers expect to sell the first OLED sheets that one day will illuminate large residential and commercial spaces...Because OLED panels are just 0.07 of an inch thick and give off virtually no heat when lighted, one day architects will no longer need to leave space in ceilings for deep lighting fixtures, just as homeowners do not need a deep armoire for their television now that flat-panel TVs are common.
The new technology is being developed by major lighting companies like G.E., Konica Minolta, Osram Sylvania, Philips and Universal Display...G.E. is developing a roll-to-roll manufacturing process, similar to the way photo film and food packaging are created; it expects to offer OLED lighting sheets as early as the end of next year.
This will be a fascinating concept that is going to accelerate the structural changes of declining energy consumption but in ways that aren't just to do with energy economics.
OLED lighting is almost unreal,” said Hannes Koch, a founder of rAndom International in London, a product design firm. “It will change the quality of light in public and private spaces
Comments