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Technology Is Changing Designs of Automobile Lights - NYTimes.com

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Technology Is Changing Designs of Automobile Lights By ALICE RAWSTHORN Published: October 14, 2012

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LONDON — Every so often, a familiar object changes radically in terms of how it is made or what it does, sometimes both. Think of what happened when gigantic mainframe computers shrank into desktops, or telephones into tiny cellphones. One of the current candidates for such a design transformation is something that is undoubtedly useful, but seems so mundane that most of us barely notice it, the car light. Enlarge This Image

Ina Fassbender/Reuters

"Adaptive" headlights are evidence of how technology affects car-light design.

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REPRINTS Have you looked at one recently? Probably not, but if you peer into the front or rear lights on certain Audis, Fords, Mercedes, Opels, Range Rovers and other new vehicles, even London buses, you will see dazzling assortments of tiny light sources, filters and reflectors cast in alluringly futuristic shapes. And that’s when they are switched off. On, they look like liquescent strands of rubies and diamonds. Then there is the impressive list of what the latest lights can do by adjusting their beams in response to obstructions on the road, approaching vehicles or changes in the weather. Suddenly they seem far from mundane.

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When I noticed how intriguing car lights had become — and I’m not alone, the artist Wolfgang Tillmans has included a beautiful series of photographs of them in an exhibition of his work at the Kunsthalle Zurich in Switzerland — I wondered why. The short explanation is that a cluster of technological advances has enabled designers and engineers to transform different aspects of automotive lighting at the same time. Many of these innovations, including more sophisticated light sources and sensor control systems, should soon have a similar effect on other products too, which means that the not-so-humble car light offers us a glimpse of the future. Up until recently, it is fair to say that car lights were relegated to supporting roles in design: Not that they were

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/arts/design/technology-is-chan…ts.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1355282535-tz4wnk/bl1PDHIkyTFmKMA

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Technology Is Changing Designs of Automobile Lights - NYTimes.com

Galerie Buchholz, Köln/Berlin

Wolfgang Tillmans's "Headlight (a)," part of an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich. Enlarge This Image

ever unimportant, especially in terms of road safety, nor were they unappealing. One of my favorite examples of 20th century product design is the spindly 1962 Toio floor lamp designed by Achille Castiglioni with a car headlight as its bulb. And some car designers have used lighting as distinguishing design features of their vehicles. When the tiny British sports car, the Austin-Healey Sprite, was being developed in the late 1950s, its designers planned to give it retractable headlamps, and mounted them on top of the bonnet. Sadly, Austin-Healey decided retractable lighting was too expensive, but the lamps stayed in place, and inspired the Sprite’s nicknames, “frogeye” in Britain and “bugeye” in the United States. A few years later, Chevrolet installed retractable headlights in a new model of the Corvette, as did Porsche in its late 1970s sports car, the 928. Even so, I doubt that anyone has ever bought a car specifically because of its lighting. (Not even a bugeye.) Nor would they now, but the latest car lights merit more attention, both as objects in their own right, and for what they tell us about the future design of other products.

One of the most important areas of innovation is in more efficient light sources, particularly in the development of miniature light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. As well as lasting longer than most other light sources, LEDs consume less power and are more flexible. The downside is that they are sensitive to heat — the lower the temperature, the more light an LED tends to produce — though there has been progress in solving this problem.

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Galerie Buchholz, Köln/Berlin

Mr. Tillmans's "Headlight (b)."

Originally introduced to cars for their functional attributes, LEDs have had a dramatic aesthetic impact on vehicle lighting. Being so small, they can be arranged in countless configurations and combined with reflectors and filters to produce sumptuous effects. Whenever new technologies emerge, designers often go over the top in applying them, which accounts for the current crop of shamelessly flamboyant car lights. The results have the improbably complex air of objects that could only have been created by advanced technology, and share the surreally intricate forms of the abstract digital images we see in data visualizations and the experimental objects produced by advanced manufacturing technologies, like three-dimensional printing, which will be increasingly common in future. New shapes have emerged throughout design history: straight lines during the “machine age” of the 1920s; soothing curves after the horrors of World War II; and “blobs” when designers started to use computer software in the 1990s.

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The dominant shapes of the immediate future will look not unlike the strange, rippling structures you can now see inside headlights and brake lights. More and more objects may soon resemble them, but car lights are in the vanguard for the simple reason that they are manufactured in such huge quantities that they can command hefty research and development budgets, which is why technologically advanced lamps appear on cheap vehicles as well as expensive ones. The same principle applies to the advances in the performance of car lights, specifically in their ability to detect and adapt to changes in their surroundings. The new “adaptive http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/arts/design/technology-is-chan…ts.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1355282535-tz4wnk/bl1PDHIkyTFmKMA

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Technology Is Changing Designs of Automobile Lights - NYTimes.com

12/11/12 10:22 PM

lights” use sensors to change the orientation of their beams. If the vehicle turns, for example, they will illuminate the road ahead rather than the sides, as conventional headlights do. Sensors can also detect how far away the vehicle is from other cars and dip the beams, or shade areas of them, to avoid dazzling their drivers. Similarly, it should soon be possible for the beams to adjust themselves to reduce the glare caused when light shines on to raindrops and snowflakes. Yet again, car lights are in the forefront of technological change, because sensors will control many other aspects of our lives in future. When it comes to driving, they will do much more than regulate the lighting once “driverless” vehicles, like those being developed by Ford Motor, General Motors and Google, hit the roads. And if it sounds scary to allow a car to drive itself, don’t forget that human beings are far from perfect behind the wheel. After all, 9 out of 10 road accidents are caused by human error. A version of this article appeared in print on October 15, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune. FACEBOOK

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