technology
OBSERVED
lighting
diodes
“OLEDs will provide people with
an entirely new way to light their
home or office.”
EARLY FUTURE
TABLE LAMP
INGO MAURER
OPTIMUS MAXIMUS KEYBOARD
ART. LEBEDEV STUDIO
MARK
BOOKMARK
AVNISH
GAUTAM
TIWE WATCH
LV ZHONGFANG
Going Organic
A new breed of flexible, ultrathin lights
seems poised for design ubiquity.
XEL- 1 TELEVISION
SONY
OLED technology is
being used in a variety
of new products,
including Sony’s XEL- 1
television (right), whose
monitor is only three
millimeters thick.
Just when you thought you’d gotten a handle
on LEDs, along come OLEDs, or organic light-emitting diodes. OLEDs have been around
since the 1980s but only recently received
widespread attention for their potential to
create a new generation of incredibly thin,
bright, and energy-efficient televisions. Now
the technology is winning converts among
industrial and lighting designers, and may
soon become a common element of people’s
everyday environments.
In the simplest terms, OLEDs are solid-state devices containing organic molecules
that emit light when electricity is applied.
Unlike the rigid crystalline layers in LEDs,
the carbon-based layers of OLEDs are thin,
light, and flexible. They are also extremely
expensive to produce, but that is beginning to
change. GE Global Research recently developed the first cost-effective printing-press
method of manufacturing paper-thin OLEDs.
“We expect the first application to be a high-end architectural product such as recess lighting in a cabinet,” a company spokesman,
Todd Alhart, says. As costs continue to come
down, Alhart predicts that entire rooms could
be illuminated by a color-tunable, light-emitting
wallpaper. “OLEDs will provide people with
an entirely new way to light their home or
office,” he says.
A more immediate application is task lighting. Last spring, Ingo Maurer debuted Early
Future, a table lamp made in collaboration
with the German manufacturer Osram Opto
Semiconductors. Resembling a small tree, the
lamp has an array of ten thin glowing “leaves”
that were only possible thanks to the OLED
panels’ unique properties: they don’t require
reflectors for light direction, and they are lightweight enough to be attached by metal pins.
OLEDs’ flexibility and modest size also make
them ideal for small-scale industrial-design
applications. Avnish Gautam won a Red Dot
Award last year for his Mark bookmark, which
uses a thin sheet of plastic embedded with
OLEDs to illuminate the pages of your favorite
book. Lv Zhongfang, a Chinese designer, has
developed a watch with a random assortment
of OLED dots that quickly arrange themselves
to display the time when the face is tapped.
And the Moscow-based Art. Lebedev Studio
recently began taking orders for its Optimus
Maximus keyboard, which allows typists to
use any language, thanks to tiny, customiz-able OLEDs embedded in the keys.
Of these examples, the first two are still
concepts and the latter has a price just shy of
$1,900—clearly, OLEDs still have some hurdles to overcome before mass adoption. But
this should be a matter of years, not decades.
Brace yourself: the organic aisle is about to
get a whole lot wider. —Brett Schaenfield
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keyboard, courtesy Art. Lebedev Studio; watch, courtesy lvzhongfang.com; TV, courtesy Sony
