Niche lighting design
Singapore 1st September 2011
I am an architectural lighting designer by profession as that is really 90% of my day to day work, like the lighting of architectural buildings, city and landscapes, commercial and hospitality applications and so on. But once in a while I get involved into niche lighting applications such as my participation into the I-Light Marina Bay lighting festival last year, the development of customised lighting products, lighting balloons, providing expert lighting opinions and other things outside the run of the mill.
Today I met with a representative of a big international retail company that has its core sales in sports and leisure equipment and is looking at setting up shop in Singapore. While the potential for architectural lighting the outlets (along IKEA style sales concept) is obviously there, our discussion actually focussed more on the development of portable lighting applications that could be used in sports and leisure application such as camping, hiking, mountaineering and so on. Today’s miniature LED technology offers heaps of new opportunities for integration in camping, hiking gear and clothing products. The first tents with in-build battery operated LED lighting are already on the market, solar versions surly are only a short step away.
Many of these retail companies know roughly what they want but lack the technical knowledge to achieve proper performance specifications for these products and that is where lighting designers could step in. I am not sure where this is going to lead me and whether I will actually end up designing lighting products for this company (mind you I have a master’s degree in industrial design, so it should be up my alley :)), but it certainly is an interesting lighting design niche that I will enthusiastically explore to see how my years of lighting design experience and technical knowledge will be put to good use…
In Light Watch today something that was forwarded to me by one of my staff, things cool that involve the latest lighting, projection and interactive control technologies. Since we are talking sports and leisure…A company called Obscura Digital developped this cool interactive lighting for pool tables, aptly called Cuelight. I believe it has been around for a while, but surely the technology improves all the time. Las Vegas wouldn’t be Las Vegas and Hard Rock Café not Hard Rock Café without it! Have a look at the following links from which I also took the reference photo’s.
http://www.obscuradigital.com/work/detail/cuelight/
http://obscuradigital.com/pool/
Light Watch 153: Playing pool will never be the same again…
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