Dyson’s new transforming lamp is much more brilliant than it looks

In 2019, Dyson launched Lightcycle, a cross-shaped light with a distinguished minimal design and the ability to track local daylight up to a precision of 3 miles and adapt accordingly. It was developed by Jake Dyson, son of James, the company founder. That particular approach has evolved into a new lamp with a very functional design, a nice looking piece of furniture that for sure is not as visually disruptive as its almost brutalist predecessor. With its alternance of straight lines and curves, empty and full volumes, the cylindrical base and a movable upper arm, and its black, anthracite or white and grey colorations, it's easier to immediately recognize it as a Dyson product. “When we designed this product, we had much more consideration for its use in interiors”, Jake Dyson says just before the European launch of the product in Milan, where we meet him.  “Milan is the world capital of light design, that's why we are here”, he explains.   Using an unique algorithm and 3 warm and 3 cool LEDs that work in tandem to simulate daylight, with potential color temperature ranging from 2,700 to 6,500 Kelvin, the new Lightcycle Morph improves what Dyson's 2019 lamp began, but is capable of more: this light was explicitly engineered to help reduce eye strain and improve visual performance, Dyson says and through a dedicated app, it can be regulated accordingly to the user's mood and age – consider that a 65-year old needs up to four times more light than a 20-year old, the British neuroscientist Karen Dawe explains. Under a functional point of view, it's an upgrade of the different technologies that can be found in 2019 Lightcycle, that Jack Dyson explained to us last year: from the software to the cooling system and how the Lightcycle has been engineered to have the best possible longevity. This is a product with an incredible amount of intelligence around and insiede:  most of the Milan launch keynote were not concerned with the product itself, but about how important are for our wellbeing sunlight and natural light cycles, and how disruptive is artificial light for living beings. Lightcycle was created expressly to provide an “intelligent” artificial illumination, that works like an extension of sunlight. A clever lamp, because its priority is the user's welfare.

The main innovation of Lighcycle Morph is that it  also adapts to different usage contexts, with four different light modes: indirect and ambient, for relaxation and indirect illumination, task, thought for work and hobbies, and feature, which creates dramatic effects. All of this is mostly possible because of the two most innovative elements in Lightcycle Morph's design: the new optical head, which Dyson defines as “intelligent”, that's fully adaptable to different needs thanks to a 360-degree maneuverability; and the aluminium-polycarbonate composite cylindrical stem, perforated with 16,740 apertures, which creates a dimmed ambient light when the head is retracted in ambient mode projecting its light beam inside the stem: it's the other big innovation from last year's Lightcycle. Two ultra-thin exposed cables run through the centre of the lamp, powering the head. The lamp looks nice and a bit normcore, its design not as disruptive as other Dyson products like for example the hairdryer, that's different from any other device of the same category. But there's intelligence in every detail, and everything results functional in it.

Dyson Lightcycle Morph comes with different presets modes for study, relax, wake-up and sleep, and it's possible to pre-programme up to 20 different light settings. This completes the circle of possibilities of a lamp designed to be personal before than customizable, and as intelligent as it can be useful for the user's wellbeing. It sports a proximity sensor, to turn it off when no light is needed, manual controls and an USB type-C port. It connects with Wifi and Bluetooth, but there's no talk about a possible integration with Alexa or Google Assistant. It comes in two versions, desk and floor, with a starting price of 599 euros.