Jake Dyson on Designing Lamps Growing up in England, the product designer Jake Dyson didn't have to look far for inspiration. His father, James Dyson, was well on his way to becoming one of the world's most high-profile inventors. Seemingly bitten by the same bug, Jake, 39, established his own design studio in London in 2004. But rather than making vacuum cleaners and fans like his dad, he's been busy reinventing light fixtures. His first product was the Motorlight Floor lamp, a motorized fixture that allows its owner to adjust the spread of the beam of light. A similar, but smaller, Motorlight Wall sconce followed, which can be controlled by remote. And next month, Mr. Dyson will introduce his newest lamp in the United States: the $900 CSYS LED task lamp. The fixture has a built-in cooling mechanism, intended to give its LEDs an extraordinarily long life, as well as a unique mechanism for adjustability. Mr. Dyson recently answered questions about his preoccupation with lighting. How did you get started in design? I studied product design at Central Saint Martins. That course was very much based on aesthetics, which is styling - which wasn't really something I was interested in. I was much more interested in mechanisms. To get on with something straight after college, I started doing interior design projects. I wasn't choosing the colors of the walls or the carpets - I was making mechanical, sensor-activated furniture. I did a big project for a jewelry store in London called Jess James, where all the cabinets were on hydraulics and were sensor-activated. When you approached them, the lights came on, and when you walked away the lights went off. Why have you focused exclusively on lighting design since then? Because I find lamps exciting as design objects. I was also frustrated that a lot of very high-end, Italian designer lights are just beautiful objects, but the intention to improve the function or the quality of light has been ignored. Is there still room for improvement? I think there's a lot of room for innovation, and also a bit of room for making the product higher quality in the way that it's manufactured. A lot of lights are not very durable. They're very elegant and sculptural, but if you were to knock one over, chances are it will be broken. How is your approach different? We don't design a light that looks like a swan, and then call it the Swan. We engineer a mechanism or an improvement to see if we can improve the function. We make the guts and then decide what it's going to look like right at the end. But we also keep a sculptural beauty about the product to make it a piece you want in a room. Are you following your father's example? Not really. With a vacuum cleaner, the opportunities for failure, and the way people are abusing it, is far higher. The only thing I would say that's similar is that we engineer, design, test, manufacture and market the product entirely ourselves. If you take a company like Flos, Artemide or Luceplan, for example, they will employ a well-known design stylist to design a light and then hand over drawings to a manufacturer to produce it, so the process is separated. We do everything ourselves. We have to, actually, because there's a lot of engineering. That is something that Dyson has always done. So you did learn some things from him. As a child, looking at my father, who was up all night stressing - and seeing how much hard work it is to perfect something - primed me, and made me understand that it's not easy. And that you don't give up. The reason I became a designer is that it's the only thing I was good at, and enjoyed, in school. It was very clear to me that you can only be good at something if you enjoy it. That's something my father seemed very supportive of. Do you feel pressure to differentiate yourself? I make lights, and he does vacuum cleaners. Whenever there's an article, the introduction quite often mentions my father, which I find quite frustrating. I understand - you can't run away from it. But there's absolutely no pressure. What was the idea behind your new lamp? The main objective of this desk lamp is to prove that you can produce a light with LEDs that lasts for life. We spent 18 months doing intense research into the issues around current LED lights. It's very evident that either the light is too blue or white - too harsh - or not bright enough, or over a short period of time, the color changes and you get an inconsistency. On some lights, for example, they go greeny or pinky. Why does the color change? If an LED chip is run too hot, the phosphor inside, which is yellow that they put onto a blue light to make it white, cracks. You get a greeny, pinky light coming through. Ultimately, if the LED is running too hot, it will also reduce its light level, and eventually burn out. So how do you cool it off? The technology that we've put into this light is a heat pipe. Heat pipes were originally used in satellites and are now used in microprocessors for computers or televisions. It's a copper tube where the air is evacuated - so it's a vacuum, and they put a drop of moisture inside. When you apply heat, the moisture boils at a very low temperature and it shoots to the cool end, where it condenses and moves back down the inside wall of the pipe and recirculates. The heat pipe runs down the entire arm of the light, so the heat is expelled over a very long surface area. What about the lamp's adjustment mechanism? I've always been very disappointed with the way that desk lamps lose their position: the head starts to droop or the springs or pivots wear. So we invented a new mechanism to position the light. It's based on a drawing board movement, and it follows the same principle of how a cable car moves on a cable, with three wheels. Wherever you let go, it stays exactly where it is, and it cannot sag. How long will the LEDs last? A manufacturer who makes LED chips will specify a running temperature of, say, 80 to 100 degrees Celsius. This gives them a life of approximately 50,000 hours to 80,000 hours. We have a temperature of 55 to 60 degrees Celsius, which gives us a 160,000-hour life, minimum. That's before the LED chip even begins to deteriorate. If you calculate that at full brightness for 12 hours a day, it's 37 years. The reason we call this product a light that lasts for life is that we think if you're old enough to buy one, then chances are you've only got 37 years left.