2016 OLED Works Lighting Exploration

OLED + RIT industrial design

A collaboration between RIT Industrial Design and OLEDWorks

RIT Industrial Design
Josh Owen | RIT Industrial Design Professor, Chair and project mentor

Kyle Laidlaw | RIT ID Alum 2016

Sydney MacMillan | RIT ID Alum 2016

Story: Kyle and Sydney are recent graduates of RIT’s industrial design program. Starting January 2016, Kyle and Sydney met with OLEDWorks and worked towards developing lighting for the new RIT dorms. The goal was to experiment and exploit the capabilities of OLED lighting, highlighting its strengths in light quality, thinness and energy efficiency.

Kyle and Sydney worked under the mentorship of Josh Owen who also contributed with a design of his own. While they began this project as students in the Fall of 2016, they worked over the summer with Owen in order to complete the prototypes by Fall of 2016.

Special thanks to:

James Watters | Senior Vice President for Finance & Administration
Lorraine Justice | Dean of the College of Art and Design
James Yarrington | Director, Campus Planning, Design & Construction Services
Giana Phelan | OLEDWorks Director of Business Development
Michael Rogers | RIT Glass Professor
FABWELD
FARO industries
Rochester Vibratory

What are OLEDs?

OLED, like LED, is a solid state lighting (SSL) technology. OLED lighting is composed of thin organic layers (carbon based) sandwiched between two electrodes. When DC current is applied, charge carriers from the anode and cathode are injected into the organic layers, electroluminescence occurs and visible light is emitted.

EXPERIMENTS:
Elegant thoughtful installations for the RIT dorms

BOOK LIGHT
Sydney MacMillan
User directed diffused light
Portable
Customization in different settings/Applicable in variety of dorm environment settings (desk, directed light from stand, wall )
Uniform soft emission*

Encased behind acrylic, light from six OLED panels is evenly emitted onto both interior sides of the book and ultimately directed outward to the area of the user’s choosing. Sit the book light on the stand for overhead lighting or place it on a desk for more direct illumination.

This experiment investigated concentrated light from OLED panels, which naturally emit soft, even light.


DRAPE LIGHT
Kyle Laidlaw
Light diffusion experiment with the combination/the marriage of fabric and OLED panels

Linen sleeves containing six OLED panels are draped over a metal tube suspended/hung/affixed on/to the wall.

This experiment investigates the visibly soft OLED light diffused through fabric. Due to the nature of OLED panels, the heat emitted from the panel is not a concern.

BRICK LIGHT
Josh Owen
Investigation considering the light quality and diffusion of OLED panels and thick glass
One OLED panel simply rests under a square brick of glass.

This experiment investigates the light quality and diffusion light when refracted through glass, loosely referencing the Brick City (RIT).

Photos by Elizabeth Lamark