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12/11/12 10:22 PMTechnology Is Changing Designs of Automobile Lights - NYTimes.com
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"Adaptive" headlights are evidence ofhow technology affects car-lightdesign.
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DESIGN
Technology Is Changing Designs of Automobile LightsBy ALICE RAWSTHORNPublished: October 14, 2012
LONDON — Every so often, a familiar object changes radically interms of how it is made or what it does, sometimes both. Think ofwhat happened when gigantic mainframe computers shrank intodesktops, or telephones into tiny cellphones. One of the currentcandidates for such a design transformation is something that isundoubtedly useful, but seems so mundane that most of us barelynotice it, the car light.
Have you looked at one recently?Probably not, but if you peer into thefront or rear lights on certain Audis,Fords, Mercedes, Opels, Range Roversand other new vehicles, even Londonbuses, you will see dazzling assortments of tiny lightsources, filters and reflectors cast in alluringly futuristicshapes. And that’s when they are switched off. On, theylook like liquescent strands of rubies and diamonds. Thenthere is the impressive list of what the latest lights can doby adjusting their beams in response to obstructions on theroad, approaching vehicles or changes in the weather.Suddenly they seem far from mundane.
When I noticed how intriguing car lights had become —and I’m not alone, the artist Wolfgang Tillmans hasincluded a beautiful series of photographs of them in anexhibition of his work at the Kunsthalle Zurich inSwitzerland — I wondered why. The short explanation isthat a cluster of technological advances has enableddesigners and engineers to transform different aspects ofautomotive lighting at the same time. Many of theseinnovations, including more sophisticated light sources andsensor control systems, should soon have a similar effect onother products too, which means that the not-so-humblecar light offers us a glimpse of the future.
Up until recently, it is fair to say that car lights wererelegated to supporting roles in design: Not that they were
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12/11/12 10:22 PMTechnology Is Changing Designs of Automobile Lights - NYTimes.com
Page 2 of 3http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/arts/design/technology-is-chan…ts.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1355282535-tz4wnk/bl1PDHIkyTFmKMA
Galerie Buchholz, Köln/Berlin
Wolfgang Tillmans's "Headlight (a),"part of an exhibition at the KunsthalleZurich.
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Galerie Buchholz, Köln/Berlin
Mr. Tillmans's "Headlight (b)."
ever unimportant, especially in terms of road safety, norwere they unappealing. One of my favorite examples of20th century product design is the spindly 1962 Toio floorlamp designed by Achille Castiglioni with a car headlight asits bulb. And some car designers have used lighting asdistinguishing design features of their vehicles. When thetiny British sports car, the Austin-Healey Sprite, was beingdeveloped in the late 1950s, its designers planned to give itretractable headlamps, and mounted them on top of thebonnet. Sadly, Austin-Healey decided retractable lightingwas too expensive, but the lamps stayed in place, andinspired the Sprite’s nicknames, “frogeye” in Britain and“bugeye” in the United States. A few years later, Chevroletinstalled retractable headlights in a new model of theCorvette, as did Porsche in its late 1970s sports car, the928.
Even so, I doubt that anyone has ever bought a carspecifically because of its lighting. (Not even a bugeye.) Norwould they now, but the latest car lights merit moreattention, both as objects in their own right, and for whatthey tell us about the future design of other products.
One of the most important areas of innovation is in moreefficient light sources, particularly in the development ofminiature light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. As well as lasting
longer than most other light sources, LEDs consume less power and are more flexible. Thedownside is that they are sensitive to heat — the lower the temperature, the more light anLED tends to produce — though there has been progress in solving this problem.
Originally introduced to cars for their functional attributes, LEDs have had a dramaticaesthetic impact on vehicle lighting. Being so small, they can be arranged in countlessconfigurations 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 havethe improbably complex air of objects that could only have been created by advancedtechnology, and share the surreally intricate forms of the abstract digital images we see indata visualizations and the experimental objects produced by advanced manufacturingtechnologies, like three-dimensional printing, which will be increasingly common infuture.
New shapes have emerged throughout design history: straight lines during the “machineage” of the 1920s; soothing curves after the horrors of World War II; and “blobs” whendesigners started to use computer software in the 1990s.
The dominant shapes of the immediate future will look not unlike the strange, ripplingstructures you can now see inside headlights and brake lights. More and more objects maysoon resemble them, but car lights are in the vanguard for the simple reason that they aremanufactured in such huge quantities that they can command hefty research anddevelopment budgets, which is why technologically advanced lamps appear on cheapvehicles as well as expensive ones.
The same principle applies to the advances in the performance of car lights, specifically intheir ability to detect and adapt to changes in their surroundings. The new “adaptive
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12/11/12 10:22 PMTechnology Is Changing Designs of Automobile Lights - NYTimes.com
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A version of this article appeared in print on October 15, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.
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lights” use sensors to change the orientation of their beams. If the vehicle turns, forexample, they will illuminate the road ahead rather than the sides, as conventionalheadlights do. Sensors can also detect how far away the vehicle is from other cars and dipthe beams, or shade areas of them, to avoid dazzling their drivers. Similarly, it should soonbe possible for the beams to adjust themselves to reduce the glare caused when lightshines on to raindrops and snowflakes.
Yet again, car lights are in the forefront of technological change, because sensors willcontrol many other aspects of our lives in future. When it comes to driving, they will domuch more than regulate the lighting once “driverless” vehicles, like those beingdeveloped by Ford Motor, General Motors and Google, hit the roads. And if it sounds scaryto allow a car to drive itself, don’t forget that human beings are far from perfect behind thewheel. After all, 9 out of 10 road accidents are caused by human error.
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