Physicians and psychologists have known for decades that long, gray winter days can rob people of their productivity and even make them clinically depressed. The disorder is called SAD (seasonal affective disorder), and the cure often as simple as changing the timing and quality of indoor lighting, whether at work or at home. A James Dyson award winner may solve the problem by allowing the ambient lighting indoors to mimic lighting conditions outdoors. This is done by installing a small module outside the home, and a light fixture inside that is wired to the sensing module and duplicates lighting conditions in the outside world on a real-time basis.
But it isn’t just sunlight, or its absence. This light fixture also duplicates the cloud cover that causes light and shadow, and even offers color and time transitions; cool, blue light early in the morning, warmer reddish light as evening draws closer.
Image via James Dyson Awards
Using programmed, full-spectrum LEDs that duplicate the natural scale of visible light from red (at 780 nanometers, or nm) to ultraviolet (at 390 nm), this LED light can even duplicate the shadows caused by wind moving tree branches or shrubs, putting humans back in touch with the natural world outside.
There are, of course, hundreds of indoor lighting choices in stores, many of them on the cutting edge of technology. Shoppers can choose from lamps that look like a bundle of reeds to lamps shaped like candles, or go modern with a cake-pan chandelier, even a sparkly disco-type lamp called the Coral Light. But only this James Dyson award winner offers mood-lifting light therapy for the long, dark days of winter.
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