The Future of Lighting: LED
30 06 2006I have long enjoyed the art form that is lighting. Back in college, I worked at a lighting store (Portland Lighting, now Lighting Works) and really enjoyed it. Light and lighting fascinate me in so many ways – ranging from photography, which is really a way of painting with light – to the art form of light fixtures themselves. It’s a great melting space between the technical and the artistic.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been fascinated by the emergence of LED lighting. David and I are grooving to it again this week. It’s flexible (literally and figuratively), it runs very cool (so it’s dramatically efficient), and it can be controlled by computer. One can create gorgeous artistic displays with it, or highly functional workspaces. Its main barrier at present is cost, but we all know how long that will last.
So, I was psyched to see this piece on Wired’s blog about LED’s use in architecture.
My favorite piece of trivia about LEDs is this – they emit something like 99% of the energy they use as light, and only 1% as heat. An incandescent light bulb is (about) 10% light, 90% heat. This is the future of lighting – yet about the only place I see them in New England is on top of police cars.
