Lighting for large indoor spaces

gliim

The dim-witted gnome that tries.

You turn a knob. The light changes.
That is the whole of it.

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A dim hall with three pendant lights lit to different levels, and a small three-knob panel on the near wall. — A room where the light needs to change depending on what is happening in it.

The whole interface

One knob. One light.

The knob you reach for is the light that moves.

Turn it and the light follows your hand, all the way down to almost nothing — no stepping, no flicker at the bottom, which is where the useful settings live.

Press it and the light goes out. Press again and it comes back exactly where you left it. There is nothing to select first, nothing to remember, and nothing to install on a phone.

The gliim enclosure: three knurled knobs in a row and one small warm indicator light below them. — Three knobs and one small light. There is nothing else on the face.

The knob does not have to be near the light.

Across a room

A panel at every door.

Some panels on a thin cable that also carries their power. Some on nothing at all. The knobs are identical, and so is the result.

A gliim panel on a plastered wall beside a doorway, a thin cable running down from it into the wall. — One thin cable, carrying both the conversation and the power. Some panels do without even that.

A panel can sit by the near door, or on the far wall thirty paces away, joined by a cable thin enough to run behind a skirting board. Where a cable cannot go, a panel goes without one.

None of them needs to know about the others. Add one by the second entrance and it simply works — turn either knob and the same lights follow. Nobody has to be told which panel is in charge, because none of them is.

Rooms it is for

Places that outgrew the switch by the door.

Halls, dining rooms, workshops, studios, libraries, meeting rooms — spaces big enough that the light needs to change depending on what is happening in them, and where the person who wants it changed is rarely standing next to the one switch that does it.

Everyone already knows how to use it. That is not a small thing in a room full of people who did not read anything beforehand.

In fairness

What it will not do.

It will not sense the room. It will not learn your habits, notice the sunset, or form a view about your sleep. It has no clock and would not know what to do with one. It cannot be reached from a phone, and adding that would mean adding a great many things that go wrong when the internet does.

If the power fails it comes back on, at the level you left it. A light that boots into darkness is a light that looks broken, and it has enough shortcomings without inventing that one.

The unit

gliim-3

Three lights, three knobs, one small enclosure. Add panels until every door has one. The renders above are how it is meant to end up; the boards themselves are on the bench, which is a different and less photogenic stage of the process.

Lights three, dimmed separately
Control a knob each — turn to dim, press for off
Panels as many as the room has doors
Link a thin two-pair cable, or none at all
Power one USB-C supply for the whole thing

Family

Part of starstucklab.

A small ecosystem of personal engineering instruments, each built to solve one specific problem and then, ideally, stop demanding attention.

Where science met poetry, had a brief fling with engineering, and now raises mildly disillusioned but talented offspring.