Shedding light on the impact of light at home
Everyday life is undoubtedly brighter with the introduction of electric light, and the right lighting at the right time can even have a positive impact on our wellbeing.
Starting with an upcoming collaboration with designer Sabine Marcelis, IKEA wants to strengthen curiosity and inspiration connected to lighting for a better life at home. We talked to IKEA Range & Product Design Manager, Anna Granath, to learn all about it.
Winters in Sweden can feel quite long, dark, and dreary. But when sun rays begin showering everything in light on a more regular basis – announcing the arrival of spring – all are more or less forgiven. Not least for Anna. ”The spring light has such a great impact on me”, she says. ”You really feel the season. The budding flowers and trees, the light play on the walls in the home. It makes me happy and gives me so much energy for a new time of the year”.
Anna is not alone in her emotional experience with light, and there’s a scientifically proven reason for that. Light – and the lack thereof – affects our body’s circadian rhythm, made up of physical, mental, and behavioural changes that follow any daily cycle. So much that the light we experience throughout the day can directly impact everything from our emotional stability to how well we sleep at night. With many of us spending much, if not most, of our time indoors, artificial light regularly disturbs our circadian rhythm.
However, artificial lighting solutions that mimic the course of daylight can improve our emotional wellbeing. It’s part of what inspires Anna to lead the lighting range at IKEA in further exploring the different beneficial aspects of light.
”Light has always been exciting to me”, she says. ”For my home, I want the light to fulfil my functional needs and look good, to be something that adds to and sets the style. But there’s also a completely different dimension to lighting. Different layers of light make a room interesting and set the tone for both room and home like no other home furnishing product”.
“Different layers of light make a room interesting and set the tone for both room and home like no other home furnishing product.”
– Anna Granath
Setting the mood for a movement
Take a lamp, for example. Turned on, it’s excellent for lighting up the dark. But a beautiful lamp design can also be a statement piece for the whole room or even completely change the space and architecture. A quality of lighting that is embraced in the upcoming collaboration between IKEA and Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis.
”Sabine has really captured the exciting part of lighting with this collection. How a lamp can be a beautiful sculpture and object when it’s turned off – creating shadow play as it is struck by natural light – only for something completely different to happen when you switch on the light. The lamp then becomes a source of light effects, such as different layers, shadows, and reflections that all together set the mood of a whole room”, says Anna.
The collection created with Sabine, set to launch in October 2022, marks the official starting point of the movement to make way for better and more emotional lighting at home. But many steps have been taken already behind the scenes. Anna and her team have learned and continue to learn from studies, collaborators, and external experts. One of the most memorable moments of learning thus far? Bringing together Sabine, a designer fascinated by light and the effects specific materials can create with it, and a chronobiologist with years of experience in studying the effects of light on living organisms.
”I’ve learned and learn new things every day about light”, says Anna. ”There are examples of lighting being used in particular settings, like a school dining hall, where it contributes to reducing food waste. It’s partly because it makes the food look more appetising and the room feels more calm and harmonic for children to be at ease and relaxed enough to take their time and eat. It’s super interesting how light can do this. How can we take this knowledge and turn it into something that is for the home and the many people?”
Lighting for the many
Light is vital for people across the globe, but its use and perspective vary across places and regions. Due to the closeness to the North Pole, Northern countries experience wider variations of light and darkness. Aspects like the low angle of the sun and longer twilight and dusk make for colourful skies play a big part. It’s a relationship to light reflected in many homes, where a mix of direct and indirect lighting of warmer temperatures is often distributed according to needs and activities.
Meanwhile, due to the high angle of the sun and thus consistently long days, many homes in Southern countries are designed for simple, cooler, and evenly distributed light. But health and wellbeing needs can benefit from greater knowledge of and access to different kinds of light in both environments.
”If you have the right light when you work, you’ll be more alert and engaged with what you need to do. If you have the wrong light before you go to sleep, such as too much block light, you won’t get the right amount of rest your body needs. Light is a question of sustainability for both your mind and body”, says Anna, adding that the knowledge brings up questions to explore. ”How can we customise light for people to feel better within their environments? With different circadian rhythms?”
For Anna, it’s a matter that’s become even more relevant during the pandemic, which she notes has created another level of curiosity around the home overall.
”Many of us are home more than before, and we notice what it looks like throughout the hours of the day”, she says. ”Home has come to mean something more too. It’s not just functional, not just a place to eat, sleep, and help your children do their homework. The sense of home being a safe place for the family triggers the curiosity further, including and beyond light.”
Better and smarter light at home
With the exploration of light, Anna and her team are looking into working with existing materials in various new ways while developing the range of smart lighting to be more for the many beyond those interested in technology.
”There’s a curiosity around new solutions, and smart lighting is definitely one of them. It can allow you to control both the setting and mood as well as lower your electricity costs”, Anna explains. ”When we first launched it, we did it pretty similar to our competitors. But now we want to use all this knowledge and insight to develop a simple plug and play that can be more for the many”, she says.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Anna herself has a nicely lit home, with a mix of smart and regular lighting distributed for both look and feel. When asked what space in her home is best lit to her taste, Anna only takes a brief moment before she answers enthusiastically:
”My bedroom. It has a great composition of several lights, fulfilling both needs and creating an atmosphere. I have a ceiling lamp that gives a very soft and harmonic light that can be changed from cool to warm, and a floor lamp programmed to create a nice wake-up in the morning and warm, soft light during the evening. It’s the perfect relaxing environment – the whole family loves to be there.”