f.lux — Bringing the Science of Light and Circadian Rhythms into Everyday Technology
This profile of f.lux and its founders, Michael and Lorna Herf, is the first in a series that shares the journeys of entrepreneurs who are building health into everyday life, creating new products and services that shape the environments around us and make healthier lives easier to realize.
f.lux is software that adjusts the color of your computer’s display to adapt to the time of day. Just as the sun adjusts the light of day, f.lux mirrors this, gradually becoming a warmer, more amber hue as day turns to evening. In addition to computer screens, f.lux now integrates with the Philips Hue system of smart light bulbs, enabling a similar shift in ambient lighting.
Eleven years ago Michael and Lorna Herf invented f.lux. Lorna had been painting at night, and realized the painting looked different in different light and so the light needed to be changed.
Michael is a computer programmer. His main focus before founding f.lux was computer graphics, imaging, lighting design, and photography. Initially, changing the screen’s light was for visual, physical, and artistic purposes. Lorna and Michael were not immediately thinking of the psychological and biological impacts of light.
Lorna began connecting the dots between biological circadian rhythms and artificial light. Since then, studies have shown that the blue light emitted from tablet, phone, and computer screens inhibits production of melatonin and directly impacts our natural biological timing. Artificial light has been around for over 130 years, but, historically, our light sources typically emitted dimmer red wavelengths. Today, more and more of our environment — from screens to energy-efficient bulbs — emit more blue light. Though application in the workplace and at home is nascent, the research points to how an underlying biology is stimulated so that there is more alertness, resulting in potential disruptions in sleep as well as changes in memory and cognition.
f.lux is quite popular — it has been downloaded over 20 million times across various platforms and many users swear by it. The early reactions to it — and the questions it raised — triggered a journey that Michael and Lorna are continuing.
“In 2009, people kept telling us how big a deal our program was,” Michael said. “But we couldn’t describe then exactly how much change would be needed to impact things like sleep or headaches. We needed to understand that complexity because suddenly we were trying to affect sleep and to help people understand the passage of time. This is what we’ve been working on since.”
Other than making us all more alert, what other unintended consequences might this have on other aspects of our lives?
Michael and Lorna Herf are now working with researchers and their platform to better understand this dynamic. Increasingly, researchers have uncovered artificial light as a contributor to conditions like breast cancer and obesity. f.lux hopes to contribute to the evolution of artificial light such that it embraces our natural rhythms instead of disrupting them.
“It is an old truth going back to when we made electric lighting that the sun is both light and a clock,” explains Michael. “Our clocks are drawn to replicate the sun’s movement. And then we have lights that you just switch on and off throughout the day. We separated time and energy. There’s no reason to not put them back together — and though we know a lot about the science right now, we still need to figure out how people could benefit from the science.”
Michael and Lorna considering how their technology would impact other activities. If light was changed on screens, how might that impact other things like outdoor time or other behaviors? And if there’s a possibility to positively impact people who work the night shift, for example, is enough known about circadian rhythms to effectively — and safely — hack circadian timing to make people more healthy?
“The reason we think software is important is that we can build the expertise into the program and refine it over time,” said Michael. “And circadian science is pretty new.”
Lewis Thomas is the author of Lives of a Cell and other essays related to the interconnectedness of life on our planet. Amongst the many things he is concerned with is the notion that we have so much more to learn about our current environment. Especially related to technology, we don’t fully understand its effects — both positive and negative — on our bodies, minds, or our planet.
f.lux is focused on making a lasting product. But for Michael and Lorna it requires deeper contemplation about both the systems within which people exist alongside the complicated lives they live.
“We know people without electric lighting go to sleep 2–4 hours earlier than we do,” explains Michael. “People with electricity are shortening their sleep by about an hour and have much longer days. We are influencing our biology in major ways with technology but we haven’t paid attention to it, or haven’t really explored why it’s significant.”
An acknowledgement of not knowing is critical to being able to more properly investigate and understand the impacts of technology on our lives. Equally important is the mode of inquiry. A willingness to consider other possibilities that do not fit neatly into a cause-effect narrative is at the heart of reimagining how we build our environments. Michael and Lorna Herf’s inquiries have led them to new insights about the role of daylight in our lives, the variations in how different people experience light and in the nature of systems change.
Michael Herf believes that our buildings and our devices keep us indoors too much, and we need to do more to bring outdoor light levels into more of our lives. ”Also, as lights get more efficient and brighter,” he notes, “the reverse can happen: it’s suddenly very easy to use extremely bright light at all times of day (even in the middle of the night) because it feels good, and so this is why we need to bring the clocks and lights back together. We need bright and dark, not just one or the other.” Our minds subconsciously use light to measure time, Michael notes, but “some buildings tend to hide the passage of time. If you think of some aspects of sunlight and daylight: how the intensity changes, how the direction of light changes, how the spectrum changes — none of these things happen indoors, so we are left without the cues we have evolved to live under.” At the same time, Michael points out, “I don’t think we would be happy to replicate exactly what happens outdoors — for instance, people don’t want the lights turning out at 4:30 pm in the winter.”
Part of the challenge of engineering lighting is that people’s internal clocks can be quite different, so then in order to personalize someone’s lighting environment, we have to learn how they respond differently. According to Michael, “these differences are incredibly substantial, so two people can see the same lighting and wind up hours apart in the times they feel most alert. We want to make tools that help people deal with these differences in an intelligent way, and really show where it’s making a difference.”
Ultimately, Michael thinks we will come to a new set of defaults for most buildings, by age group or general demographics. And then, in his view, some buildings will be much more alive, aware and supportive of their occupants, when privacy concerns permit that to happen. He believes that this will certainly happen in your home, but maybe every building could do this in the future.
One challenge is the degree of change that is required to make a significant impact on health. “Generally I think that major changes are needed,” says Michael, “and overall people tend to be pretty excited right now about small changes, but they avoid making any major ones. For instance, people are very good at seeing small ‘color’ changes, but these don’t always correspond to effects on health and circadian rhythms. Outdoors we might see a million-to-one difference in intensity between day and night (this is a big signal to your body), and indoors we are lucky to get 5-to-1, which makes for a much weaker signal. The lighting industry has been excited about how lighting can change over time, but their clients don’t want to pay that much more for it, yet. And also, there are questions about how much more energy we should use in order to do this kind of thing, too.”
Michael Herf believes that we’re at an exciting time. Circadian science is still developing — we’re learning that the impacts on health go way beyond sleep and alertness — and there are opportunities to apply that knowledge. “This idea that we can shape our environment to influence our health is so amazing,” says Herf, “and we have to keep finding out the ways to make it work better over time.”
