Courtesy Rich Brilliant Willing
For Brooklyn-based lighting designers Rich Brilliant Willing, new technological development mean new opportunities to create lighting that is beautiful, functional, and unique. In March, at the Light + Building fair in Frankfurt, the studio presented a conceptual design for a flexible lighting panel made with cutting edge Organic LED technology from manufacturer OLEDworks.
Organic Light Emitting Diodes, or OLEDs, are a solid state lighting technology like LEDs, but they have several advantages over their more commonplace cousins. Unlike the harsh blue glare of LED light, OLEDs produce a very pure, natural light, that does not need to be filtered or refracted to create a warm, welcoming tone.
Although they are not yet very widely used in commercially available lights, the technology has been around for a few years says Alexander Williams, one of the co-founders of Rich Brilliant Willing. The firm has had its eye on OLEDs for a few years, and as the technology evolved and the cost began to drop, they decided the time was right to begin developing products with the new light source.
One of the big recent advances in OLED technology has been the ability of producers like OLEDworks to create lighting panels that are so thin that they can be made flexible. In order to take advantage of the material’s incredible thinness and flexibility, the design team looked to another cutting edge technology to create a malleable housing for their lights.