It’s that time of year again. If you don’t wake up bright and early, it’s dark before you know it. In my neck of the woods, sunset is around 5:15 pm. Not only is it a bummer for those trying to squeeze in an outside workout, it means that you’ll be lighting your home to compensate for the lack of sunshine outside. It’s the perfect time of year to introduce LED home lighting (light emitting diodes).

Noah Horowitz, Director at NRDC, wrote over at Huffington Post, that LED lighting could cut our nation’s electricity costs by $13 billion annually. This in turn would save on pollution because that’s how much energy is generated from 30 coal fired power plants annually. Individually, LED home lighting saves more than $125 over the 20 year lifetime of the bulb. With a house full of LEDs, that’s some big savings.

These bulbs have gone from costing $25 per bulb just a few years ago to just around $9 and they’re available at most hardware stores. And your local utility may even offer a rebate of up to $5 per bulb.

With every size, shape, and light quality now available, here are some tips for getting what you want.

According to the Huffington Post:

For example, if you want the light to have that yellowish incandescent bulb look, buy one that says “soft white” and has a color temperature of 2700K. If you prefer more of a cooler, bluish-white look, buy one marketed as “daylight,” which will have color temperature of 5000K or so. Given that preferences vary by consumers, be sure to save your receipt and only buy a few initially so you can test and see which type you like before switching your whole home to LEDs.

And when it comes to getting ready for the holiday season, choose LED string lights. Today they’re available in just about every size and color.

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Image: Stephen Ridgeway

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Über-human folds in industrial and home design.

Foraying into the foldy discipline of origami design once more, let’s take a look at a few bends that have captured the design world – in both market and imagination.

The first comes care of bendables expert Pleat Farm, a perennial favorite of ours, for whom folds hold more than cornered materials. They just might hold the answer to everything, according to some. But in the case of design student Christophe Guberan of Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL), it’s not entirely clear why the crinkle conjoins. In other words, it folds therefore it is…what? Cool seems the most sensible adjective for it.

He created the Hydro-Fold inkjet printer, which prints paper that pleats into 3D foms. It works by printing a mixture of water and ink that causes the paper to bend along the wet lines and humid areas.

The forms are created via a computer program that generates patterns for different configurations.

Issey Miyake, meanwhile has been avidly folding and creasing technology-driven art and fashion since the 1980s (he did Jobs’ turtlenecks, too – entirely pleatless yet visionary). The designer’s latest collection is not that of clothing or even cloth, but an LED lighting series made from recycled PET plastic bottles.

He’s working in collaboration with Italian lighting brand Artemide on the project, a forward-thinking solution for our plastic water bottle problem.

Finally, from German designer Elisa Strozyk a wooden blanket made usable from giving chips of wood the multi-faceted geometric treatment.

The blankets are among a larger Accordion Collection, which also include wood pleated into lighting fixtures and origami cabinets.

The designer states, “[the wooden textiles are] between hard and soft, challenging what can be expected from a material or category. It looks and smells familiar but feels strange, as it is able to move and form in unexpected ways.”

Images: Elisa Strozyk; Pleat Farm; Fast Company; Elisa Strozyk

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Surf’s up: the Rogue Wave is part of designer Evelyn Hutter’s Water Pressure series.

The Rogue Wave is part of Water Pressure, an eco-friendly lighting series designed and created by Evelyn Hutter of Dwellings LTD in Brooklyn, NY. Illuminated with energy efficient LEDs, all of the chandeliers in the series are meant to convey a feeling of “suspended animation.”

Hutter took her inspiration from the tumultuous and mercurial element of water, interpreting it in all its forms: man-made, natural and in the case of the Rogue, oceanic. In addition to using LED lights, which last ten times longer than incandescent bulbs, she also uses a less toxic method called powder coating – a dry, non-leaching and resource-recoverable process to metal plate the fixture bodies and canopies. All of Hutter’s chandeliers are hand-constructed without the use of glues or adhesives.

“We believe in bowing to our environment,” Hutter explains on her site, “in which water is the most precious resource, both in production of our chandeliers and consumer use beyond.”

$2,800

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored. Submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

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If there were an Endangered Designs list running alongside its biological counterpart, it’s possible light fittings just got added to the bottom.

Modern technology is all about shrinking. Take the shift from the hefty, brick-like cellphones of the early 90s to the hands-free sets that make people question your sanity when you’re chatting into the air. For gadgets and appliances to be really cool, they should be unobtrusive to the brink of invisibility. For example, solar power. A garden covered in wire-strewn paneling? Not elegant (this is better). So technological advances like Nanosolar’s solar cell film will help solar panels truly disappear and blend seamlessly into your home aesthetic.

Now it’s the turn of LEDs to go stealthy. As Metaefficient reports, a new variety of organic LED (OLED) is promising an efficiency near the hallowed Energy Star standard.

Why is this big news?

Because OLEDs are rather different from the bulbs and spotlights to which we’ve grown accustomed. They’re flat and paper-thin. They’re comprised of a film of organic material that glows when a current runs through it, making OLEDs ideal for digital watches, dashboard displays and nightlights. Unfortunately, efficiency has been lagging – until now.

There are some interesting implications in the wind. If electroluminous lighting takes off and form truly follows function, lights are going to disappear as a distinct item of decor. It’s possible that our dream eco-house of the future won’t have such a thing as a “light fitting” – and one of the most common items of household furniture will blend into the walls, ceilings, floors and sides of our furniture (here’s an early example). Lamps would become retro (fun, quirky, but definitely last-century) and our living spaces would be transformed.

Is it lights out for lights?

Image: moriza

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Let’s hear it for Hollywood going green while translating Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s groundbreaking graphic novel Watchmen. In the movie, thanks to Sony Imageworks and Visual Effects Supervisor Peter Travers and his team, Doctor Manhattan is sustainably covered in 2500 LED lights.

Quite the feat.

A little reference on the novel for those of you not up to speed. It’s 1959 and we find Dr. Manhattan, famed for his work at a nuclear research center, accidentally locked in a test chamber and caught in an “Intrinsic Field Subtractor.”

Being turned into a blue-skinned super being (thanks to bad timing with the aforementioned test chamber), Doctor Manhattan is contracted by the United States government and is the only character in the story who possesses real superpowers. Who wouldn’t with 2500 eco-friendly lights strapped on?

Over time, he becomes more and more detached from humanity, (think a futuristic Grizzly Adams) illustrated by the fact that he wears fewer clothes over the passing years and goes into self-imposed exile away from the earth.

Is this where Peter Travers got inspired to create the famed blue man for the big screen? I caught up with Travers recently to have him field a few questions I, a Watchmen fan myself, was curious about. Here’s what he had to say.

Amy: I read an interview on Popular Mechanics that you blew through reading author Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen in one sitting. What was it about Dr. Manhattan that made you want to create him for the screen?

Peter: The desire to do the character came from how challenging it would be. Anytime you have the opportunity to create a digital human, however blue he may be, for a live-action motion picture, you jump at the chance.

Whose idea was it to load up Dr. Manhattan with all the LED’s?

It was a group decision and it had to be. And the early discussions went on even before I came on board. The whole concept had to be embraced by everyone on set, including the Director and the Director of Photography. The light suit was a lighting tool on set, and was used even when Doc was not in frame. We would sometimes have Billy Crudup standing just off camera, not saying anything, but he glowed onto the other actors. We called it above the line lighting.

LED’s run pretty hot generally. How did Billy Crudup fare with the heat of 2500 of them?

The LED’s did not actually run that hot, and they were not on for any length of time. We turned the suit off as soon as the take was over. The suit was never on for more than 10 minutes straight. If it did provide any warmth, that was a good thing because we shot the movie in Vancouver, BC in the middle of winter.

Bad guys in the movie get atomized frequently. How did you make Dr. Manhattan’s muscles flex so realistic while destroying them?

Very carefully. The thing about this stuff, visual effects, is that we are usually doing something that has no typical frame of reference, so we are kind of winging it. That’s why it’s an effect. You just try to get some kind of reference that is as pertinent as possible but nothing ever completely translates. We took reference video of a bodybuilder, acting out certain poses, but we could only use it in spirit because Doc’s body proportions were different.

Was it difficult to make his skin look real with all the blue lights?

Yes, the main dilemma with Doc was that he had to appear as if he was a light source, but he couldn’t be so bright that you could not read his performance. It was something that we had to balance in every shot. The skin itself was challenging, beyond the glowy nature of it, just because getting realistic looking skin in computer graphics is very difficult in itself. The textural quality of the pores and the tiny hairs etc. The devil is in the details.

Have you started thinking how that same blue glow could be used in other animated projects?

Not really, because every show has different needs. Sometimes it’s airplanes, sometimes it’s robots. But if some new show comes in that requires a glowing naked character, I’ll know exactly what to do.

I was reading an article in New York Magazine about, well, Dr. Manhattan’s manliness in the face of human evil. Do you think altering the size of his penis changed anything about what Gibbons was trying to say about politics, society, and the human condition?

I have no idea. I think that would be reading too much into it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, even if it’s blue.

Photo Courtesy of Sony Imageworks

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