Designing smart lighting
In the summer we started working with a Plessey to come up with a new smart light for the smart home. Smart lights have been around for a while now and that path is becoming an increasingly well-trodden one. But as designers we always think we can do better. Nothing is perfect until it’s been redesigned (and then that reimagining is just low hanging fruit for another cocky team of creatives to pick from), and for us, the smart lights that are out there were far from perfect. In fact, smart lighting isn’t even that smart.
Perhaps the best place to start when designing a smart product is to define what ‘smart’ actually means.
Being from the ‘Human-Centred Design’ school of thought, ‘smart’ for us means that it has to help solve real problems intelligently. Usually this means without people telling them what to do. These lights would have to know when there was a problem and solve it. But what problems can smart lighting solve that normal, ‘dumb’ lighting can’t do already? Lights are obviously hugely useful, they allow people to see in the dark, they help us feel safe and help us focus. They’re welcoming, mood-setting and atmosphere-making but surely even ‘dumb’ lights can do these things? People have been using lights like this for forever.
There are lights out there that are ‘smart’. These often come in the shape of classic light bulbs but with some baked-in technology. And of all of the examples we looked at, Philips’ Hue bulb is perhaps the most successful. That is to say that it’s popular and has been relatively well received, not that it’s actually very ‘smart’ only really being able to change colour. A more worthy contender for truly smart light would maybe be Stack’s Alba bulb. In Spanish, ‘alba’ means ‘dawn’. This makes sense for a small light bulb that has an inbuilt ambient light sensor that can automatically adapt the level of light it emits. It’s this ‘automaticness’ that makes it smart because unlike Hue, it doesn’t require an actual person flicking switches or swiping iPhones, it feels like it has its own (admittedly small) brain that’s making its own decisions. Although this is undoubtedly cool, it doesn’t really feel like the future is here just yet.
Perhaps this is because there is another level of ‘smart’ that is more intelligent than either Hue or Alba. As of yet no smart lighting really falls into this category, the category ‘thoughtful’. Thoughtful products are those that can sense and monitor a wide range of stimuli and react accordingly. They know who’s using them and can make changes depending on that person’s preferences. These are products that understand what’s going on, they really understand and, what’s more, they can identify a range of real problems and know exactly how to solve them.
But how do you instil these qualities into a light? Why would it be a light in the first place? And what are benefits of light even being involved at all? Well firstly lighting does have a lot of really interesting and unique qualities but it also has a lot of pitfalls. Firstly, we need to look at the physical properties of light in the home. Lights are, pretty much without fail, in every room of every house, and they’re often hanging above us, looking down on everything we do. So therefore they occupy prime real estate for any all-seeing-eye that can know what we’re up to in our houses and respond to our wants and needs. The infrastructure of lighting also lends itself well for smart adaptation. Unlike a Nest thermostat for example, a smart light bulb doesn’t require a complicated, expensive installation. You can just screw it in wherever you want. And as for future technologies, witricity, Lifi and personal cloud storage make lighting an even more exciting area for us to explore. Lighting also conjures up some pretty powerful emotions and can be used to tackle some real problems around security, energy saving and comfort. And as our daily screen time increases and devices designed to cope with bright daylight keep doing their job long into the night, changes in lighting can help emulate the natural cycles of day and night and help our circadian rhythms.
So all of this is very exciting and there are a lot of opportunities here and working with Plessey we tried to make use of these. But sensing technologies will continue to develop and with them will come even more opportunities and so today’s most sophisticated smart lighting interventions will quickly become redundant. So for Plessey we decided to take a slightly different approach. We designed a modular smart light that tackled a range of different issues and could adapt and evolve with developments in tech and people’s acceptance of smart technology. In fact, it’s not just a light, it’s intended to be an entire system and we’ve developed 3 different sensor modules to get the ball rolling. These change the function of the smart light, one detects changes in air quality, another has built-in smoke detection and movement sensing capabilities and we created a ‘hands-free home’ module so you could play music throughout the house or use your phone. Although these aren’t areas quite as exciting or futuristic as Lifi or personalised cloud storage, our modular system means that when these technologies become more available or when we find the right people to work with, we can easily incorporate them into the system.
