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ICFF 2006: The Leaf
We got a demo of Yves Behar’s LED Leaf lamp for Herman Miller at ICFF. It’s impressive. There are two integrated touch sensitive controls in the base of the lamp that regulate the amount of ‘cool’ vs. ‘warm’ light and light intensity. I’m told that LEDs are hard to work with because they’re sometimes too bright and the UV rays can potentially be harmful. The Leaf solves these problems in an elegant way with dimmer control and surprising articulation that allows the user to direct the light practically anywhere - all in a package barely thicker than a leaf. UPDATE: I may have been misinformed about LEDs, read Woode's comment.
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the warm vs cool aspect is really nice, but the prototypes at ICFF did not impress me all that much. I felt like I was going to bend the metal whenever I tried to move the lamp.
also, the controls were nice, if you're into the ipod-like controls(i prefer a bit more tactile response).
The technology here is what impresses; as for the design itself - ? You notice how even the representative in the demo has trouble manipulating the object.
This was my impression of the ICFF at large: lots of interesting appropriation, very little interesting design.
I think there may be errors in this article regarding light output from LEDs. I don't think it can be said that LEDs are too bright or emit UV.
As in the Leaf lamp, fixtures for general and task lighting must use multiple LEDs to produce sufficient light output. The problem may be rather that LEDs are very directional--a single LED doesn't output in a 360 degree pattern like a common incandescent bulb does.
A sampling of LEDs on the LED Museum site (www.ledmuseum.org) shows that white LEDs have no output in the UV spectrum. The light-emitting part of an LED only produces a single color, like orange or green. Because of the way white LEDs work, they are able to emit light on a wider spectrum--they're actually blue LEDs with a phospor to convert the blue light to white. For an LED to emit UV or infrared, it must be specifically manufactured to do it.
Manufacturers of LED fixtures such as Color Kinetics (http://www.colorkinetics.com/ls/intelliwhite/intelliwhite.html) promote their products for use in museums and galleries precisely because the LEDs don't produce any UV light that would fade artwork, and no damaging infrared either.
That being said, it is exciting to see designers creating new objects using LEDs. As LED technology continues to advance, I expect more designers will take advantage of them to produce beautiful objects that wouldn't be possible with incandescents or fluorescents.