My sniffing the future trends continues. This time from the point of view of light, colors and related innovation and design. To compensate for the “noise” created by crowds, traffic, information overflow, mobile virtual reality, and the entire semiotic universe, we yearn for peace and quiet; an emptier space to charge our batteries. How does this show in lighting and color design?
Last week I interviewed life coach Maaretta Tukiainen. She told me how effectively light can be used to impact our daily moods: to create exciting shadows, play with indirect lighting, relax or activate the mind as need be. Lighting plays a larger role in our lives than we have perhaps realized after artificial light was invented.
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Today in Tikkurila seminar, lighting designer Jukka Korpihete continued the theme. We have begun to realize that light does not have to be direct or even throughout the space. It can be managed by reflections via surfaces or by the shape and structure of a fixture. Cold LED light becomes softer when transmitted from a tapered two-piece hood, for example, or by using porous materials in the pendant. The light source may be the most important part of a modern interior. The happy owners of one of Korpihete’s designs said: “so, now we’ve found a home to decorate around the lamp”.
Lighting becomes more and more a part of the interior. Innovation director at Tikkurila, Anna-Maija Hirvi makes a point: future is – now, and means that the choices we make today increasingly influence what kind of a future we will have. According to a survey conducted by Tikkurila, the walls could already be digital so that we could easily change the color and mood of a space. New technology is welcome in Finnish homes as long as it’s embedded and perhaps hidden so that the atmosphere remains traditionally cozy. Nevertheless product development accelerates: one example is a Swedish project that studied how color and light in cooperation can save energy.
The overall theme of color visionary and color marketeer Doty Horn’s color forecast for 2015 is silence. In the old times, success and wealth were expressed by building a home full of valuable objects. Today, the most fortunate of us occupy the emptiest, roomiest, most secluded spaces available. The Silence color theme consists of four color palettes called Noise, Braille, Blur and Quiet. To know more about them, please visit The ColorVoyant Watch blog.