How the humble LED will revolutionise the home

Every 50 years or so, a new technology comes along that revolutionises the home — and it is rarely the thing that advertisers spend their budgets trying to convince us it will be.

It wasn’t the Monsanto House of the Future, a plastic bubble of a home that opened at Disney’s Tomorrowland in California in 1957. It wasn’t the Automatic Home Laundry, a machine designed to wash, dry, iron and fold clothes first dreamt up by ball bearings company New Departure in 1955. And it won’t be the internet-enabled fridge, revolutionising your kitchen since 2000.

The technologies that really have an impact on our homes are often unanticipated. Take the car, the great suburbanator. Not only did it empty downtowns and leave them to fester, but it added a lump of uninhabitable concrete to the square footage of each lot — the garage.

But the next piece of tech poised to upend the home might surprise you. It has become commonplace — often it is built into that former domestic disrupter, the television. I am talking about the light-emitting diode, or LED; those red, green and blue little fellows that, when combined, are the innovation that many believe will change the way we live.

Everyone in the interiors world is obsessed with LEDs. Architects, designers, electricians: no one is as excited about smart homes, smartphones or the internet of things. Flick through interiors magazines and you will not see designers incorporating those into their vision of the desirable home.

The LED is different. It is giving creative people creative ideas.

LEDs are being incorporated into furniture design. They are being put into walls and windows — hitting all sustainability targets with electricity to spare. Some, such as Terry McGowan of the American Lighting Association, describe the LED as the fourth age of electric light.

As Architectural Magazine wrote back in 2008, why illuminate a surface, when the surface can be illuminating? Now extend this to the rest of your living space.

Modular, smart LED panels such as the Nanoleaf Canvas could liberate the ceiling from overhead lights. Engineers are waging war on traditional LCD-screen televisions by creating OLED displays where every pixel is self-illuminating, improving picture quality. New advances in electrochromic glass transform windows into walls, light displays and screens using LEDs.

Light can transform our inner states. In May at LightFair, the leading light industry convention, attendees will be taught how colours affect neurological states — which make us happy or sad, vulnerable or confident, sleepy or alert.

Elsewhere, agriculture enthusiasts share tips and tricks on how to light up indoor gardens to maximise harvests. LEDs make all this possible, and for a fraction of the energy cost of conventional lighting.

The LED revolution has been a long time coming — but only recently has the tech been around to facilitate it. The original LED was supposed to be a laser — you cannot get more futuristic than that. But the problem was, while it emitted a powerful light, you could not see it. It was infrared.

What followed was 60 years of incremental innovation — culminating in the 2014 Nobel Prize for physics. Key leaps forward included the development of visible red light, then green and blue lights, and then super-bright versions of all three.

LEDs were first incorporated individually into watches, calculators and other tech needing low-consumption, solid-state and long-life battery power. Then they moved into street lights and car headlamps.

When finally it was possible to combine red, green and blue lights to create a pure white light — the colour of the future — LEDs became the tech that can illuminate our streets, our screens and our sitting rooms.

The gadgets in my house — tablets, smartphones, voice-activated servants — are not adding anything to the layout of my home. They’re like roommates: they moved in, and when they move out the floor plan will be the same.

But LEDs will change the home in fundamental ways. They’ll tear down walls and make everything interactive. We will share data via LED light waves — LiFi, it is being called — which could be the application that will usher in the internet of things.

If the promises of the LED enthusiasts come to light, it will rewire more than just the space behind the plasterboard. Like the car and the television, it will bring a new dimension to our domestic lives.

Aleks Krotoski is a psychologist and writer. She presents “The Digital Human” on BBC Radio 4. Follow her on Instagram @aleksk and Twitter @aleksk

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