34 years ago, window-clear headlamp lenses opened new possibilities for designers—and new challenges. Now they could (and now they had to) design the inside of the lamps, too, not just the outside. This job did not exist before, and some designers chafed at what they considered a thankless, low-glamour task. “I’m here to design cars, not components!” was a complaint frequently heard in the corridors. But lighting design gained traction to became important and even glamorous. Now this job is coveted, and good lighting designers get snapped up and treated well by automakers and tier-1 suppliers.
By and by, LEDs came to be individually-drivable, thanks to pioneering work by the likes of Elmos, Texas Instruments, NXP, Infineon, Melexis, and Onsemi. This allows animated light: sequential turn signals and welcome / farewell light-dances. Things got started with around 10 LEDs, and at that scale the lamp designer can do it with Photoshop and an Excel spreadsheet shared to R&D engineers, who program it into the main lamp ECU with the support of the lamp tier-1. Quite easy.
Then came 84-pixel lamps, signals with over 200 pixels (like the Polestar 2 and Xiaomi SU7, or Audi with digital OLED). So many LEDs, so many scenarios; really too much for the Photoshop-and-Excel method. So once again, a new kind of job was created within automakers to develop the lighting experience for vehicle users. This is the UX (user experience) team, including Motion Designers, Studio engineers and SW engineers, whose complex job is to design and define the light sequences played when the driver approaches or leaves; define the activation triggers and methods (with interior display, with phone, with voice, by default), define how many LED segments will activate, how many configurations there will be, possible updates over the car’s lifetime, where to store the sequence programming (vehicle central ECU, lamp ECU), whether the automaker or one of the tier-1s will write the software…all within tight cost and time constraints.
Difficult decisions have to be made smartly to translate the design dream from a video to an LED sequence with a refresh rate appropriate to avoid flicker, with appropriate resolution and number of PWM steps, and without lag or synchronization issues left/right or front/rear while the vehicle is still partially asleep (so not all ECUs are active), and without consuming too much power. The software and hardware specifications are reciprocally dependent, so neither can be done without the other being done. Hardware specifiers need enough budget to buy ECUs with enough channels, memory, and capabilities, and software specifiers need to know what kind of hardware they’re writing software for—which comes first, the chicken or the egg? And regulations in various markets differently constrain various aspects of light animations, such as their duration, intensity, and colour (like new “answer back signal” constraints in UNECE)). Gee, is that all?
But this isn’t multiple disjoint worlds, it is multiple continents on one world: designers and engineers, hardware and software specialists, all working together. That was quite evident during my visit to Lynk & Co Design to talk with HMI and UX Chief Designer Louise Kivi. On the brand’s Z10 model, they decided to have 414 exterior RGB LEDs. Compared to monocolour LEDs, an RGB job is more than thrice as complex—much more, actually, to manage colour matching within the HW limitation and create dynamic but still smooth movements, for examples. It was really interesting to understand how the Lynk team worked from concept to production, and to see the final result.
Some people will like it, and others might not. Me, I really like it; this is the fruit of creativity, 2024-style!
Sincerely yours,
