Jake Dyson Introduces Lamp That Adjusts for the Daylight Where You Live

The LightCycle follows our circadian rhythms via your phone and GPS.

Years ago, at theInternational Furniture Fair in New York, I admired Jake Dyson's CSYS lamp, with its very clever heat pipe structure, then needed to cool the LED bulbs. Jake is now working with dad James Dyson as chief lighting designer, and is still upgrading the CSYS.

Lloyd Alter/ Jake Dyson at ICFF/CC BY 2.0The latest version is the LightCycle, which can change change colors throughout the day to match our circadian rhythms. Dyson says, "Our bodies can be influenced by daylight's changing spectrum of color and brightness. So our new light adjusts with the daylight where you live."

This is actually quite interesting. It still has the heat pipes to keep the LED cool, important for longevity (he promises 60 years) and the wonderful balancing mechanism that lets it move up and down. It pumps out a very bright 1120 lumens and has a Colour Rendering Index (CRI) of 90. (Here's a post that explains why CRI is important.)

And of course, it has an app which "uses your phone's time, date and GPS data to track the daylight where you live." So it can deliver light that's pretty close to what the sun is delivering, between a really warm 2700K to a very cool 6500K. Katherine Schwab of Fast Company explains:

The lamp, called LightCycle, is powered by an algorithm that mixes three cool LED lights and three warm LED lights to replicate the natural light of any GPS location on the planet during a specific time of day and year. The algorithm understands your precise location through the accompanying app. That means that using the same lamp in Iceland in winter at noon will yield a dramatically different color and type of light than in New York City on the same day and at the same time.

Head of LightCycle lamp/ Lloyd Alter/CC BY 2.0

You can have it run on automatic or adjust manually.

The whole issue of Circadian Rhythms is controversial. I have always taken the position that if you are near a window with access to natural light, then it's not such a big deal. But particularly as you get older, you need more light to read and work, so the artificial light source becomes more important. Our body clocks are tuned to the change from warmer, redder light in the morning through cooler blue in the mid-day, back to red in the evening as the sun has to travel through more of the atmosphere. Our bodies notice if the light doesn't change, and we can feel tired and run-down. Given the amount of light that this will be dumping onto your desk, it could make a real difference.

No doubt people will complain that I am pushing a $600 desk lamp but hey, think about it as ten bucks a year for the next 60 years of having better lighting that keeps you awake and happier at your desk. Then it sounds cheap.