Innovative Interactive Lighting Design Responds to People’s Behavior

January 19, 2005 – Philips Electronics’ design group, Philips Design, and the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre at the Royal College of Art in London have collaborated to explore innovative ways for people to interact with light in public spaces, and developed a completely new paradigm for lighting applications and interfaces. ‘Glowing Places’ uses interactive lighting, embedded in public seating, to respond to people’s presence and behavior. It will make its U.S. debut at the Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

Dynamic lighting
Glowing Places consists of transparent seating units, embedded with LED (light-emitting diode) strips and sensors, measuring the presence of people over time. Both the number of people sitting and the length of time they stay create a social interactive pattern that is translated by patented software into lighting effects in the furniture. Thus, many people sitting for brief periods of time would result in lighting that expresses busy activity, whereas one or two people sitting for a longer period would trigger mellow lighting.

The result is lighting that stimulates social interactions in public spaces. The dynamic lighting systems make public places, waiting rooms for example, more pleasant, because in contrast to static artificial lighting the Glowing Places concept emulate aspects of changing natural light. As well as being a social catalyst, the illuminated chairs create a valuable personal space, giving a feeling of rest, tranquility and personal connectivity.

Applications for the Glowing Places concept include public spaces such as shopping malls, subway stations and other static artificially lit indoor spaces where people gather.

The Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
The project will make its U.S. debut at the Film Festival in Park City where celebrities, VIPs and media will get the opportunity to interact with Glowing Places for the first time at the Philips Welcome Lounge. The Philips lounge is the place for festival attendees to relax and take some time out from their hectic schedules, while giving them the opportunity to interact with the latest Philips innovations from 42" Flatscreen TVs with Ambilight to the new Sonicare Intelliclean electric toothbrush. Visitors will also get the opportunity to see future technologies that clearly illustrate how technology can be advanced and simple to use at the same time - a concept that captures the very essence of where the Philips brand is going.

Research: The emotional building
Glowing Places is built on Philips Designs research on the theme of the ‘emotional building’ – a building that responds to the behavior and feelings of its users by visually expressing the activity inside. With this in mind, Glowing Places demonstrates the importance of lighting to signify the changing emotional states.

Research is at the basis of Philips Design’s High Design Process. This process, created in the early Nineties, aims at the development of technology products and solutions that are culturally relevant for people and that smoothly integrate the benefits of technology into people’s lives. In order to do so, all design work is based on a thorough social and cultural research, conducted within Philips Design itself on behalf of Philips’ product divisions.

Philips Design’s research approach has been made public through numerous visionary projects that have been widely acclaimed by the public and press and have won several design competitions. These can be seen at: www.design.philips.com

SOURCE Philips