Natural rhythms reflected in lighting system
If you were to shrink human evolution into 24 hours, artificial light would have existed for a mere seven seconds. Having been around for such a relatively short time, it’s had an outsized effect on the way people work, play, and sleep.
British neuroscientist Dr. Karen Dawe concedes that while there have been enormous benefits from artificial light, it can be hard on humans, whose behaviour has been directed for millennia by the rising and setting of the sun.
“Daylight changes in colour and intensity throughout the day,” says Dawe, who after 17 years as a neuroscientist at Bristol University joined the lighting team at technology juggernaut Dyson in 2017. “With most domestic lighting … you flick a switch and it comes on at its brightness and colour temperature and it stays like that until you switch it off. That’s completely at odds with what our visual system has adapted to.”
The Dyson gig, which combines research with home product development, is a good fit for Dawe, who has long been fascinated by how lifestyle and the environment affect physiology. Her brief now includes developing lighting that improves quality of life.
It starts with an understanding of the crucial role light plays in human experience, says Dawe. “We care now about our air quality, where our water comes from and what’s in it. But as primarily visual creatures, we consume light massively. To date, we have not really paid attention to the quality of light and what it’s doing to us. But the Circadian rhythms you see in everything — algae, bacteria, fungi — are fundamental drivers of our existence.”
Dawe’s contribution to more human-friendly light came as part of a team that created Dyson’s Lightcycle Morph, the second iteration of a light fixture that tracks natural daylight, intelligently transforms it for the user’s task, age, mood, and local daylight, and continually adjusts colour temperature and brightness.
How does it do that? The short answer is that by using data from over a million atmospheric measurements of light conditions in the earth’s atmosphere at different times of day, a 32-bit microcontroller continually interprets and communicates data to a very sensitive optical driver.
There are pre-set study, relax, precision, boost, wake-up, and sleep modes, and users can assign up to 20 custom settings. Recognizing, for example, that a 65-year-old needs up to four times more light than a 20-yearold, the light also corrects brightness based on the age entered into the app. It’s also designed to reduce the flicker that can cause eye strain and fatigue. Dimming and colour temp can be controlled manually, and the unit has a USB-C charger for phones and tablets.
The fixture uses three warm and three cool LEDS. To solve the overheating often associated with them, a heat-pipe technology that draws heat away from LEDS using a bead of water was devised. According to Dyson, that means light quality will last unchanged 60 years.
The optical head rotates 360 degrees, so light can be bounced off walls, floors and ceilings, or above a favourite piece of art.
A colour-warming orange filter can reduce colour temperature low enough to simulate the glow of candlelight. “That’s exactly what is most sympathetic to your body clock at night — a warmer, dimmer light,” says Dawe.
The Lightcycle Morph is available at Dyson Demo stores in Toronto and Vancouver and on Dysoncanada.ca. Desk lights start at $850. Black/black and white/silver finish combinations are available.
Dawe believes thoughtfully-designed lighting can not only improve visual health, but enhance physical and mental well-being.
“When I was studying biology, you learned about each system separately, “she says. “More recently, people realize that the human body doesn’t actually respect those divisions — that these systems all interact, all the time.”