Executive Summary

OLEDs offer a large variety of design options. This refers to really free design parameters such as shape, size and emissive colour, but also to technology enforced parameters such as off-state appearance and busbar structures.

In this deliverable architectural and aesthetical research has been performed to identify most suitable market entry parameters. Especially for size and shape, existing standards and common building materials have been evaluated. It turned out that a suitable OLED tile size could be 15 cm x 15 cm pitch size and multiples thereof.

This edge length was transferred to other tile shapes such as hexagons and triangles.

Several room models were built with a ceiling illumination completely made of OLEDs. The variations were shown to test persons who had to rank the modifications according to their personal taste.

In general, it can be concluded that larger tiles are preferred over smaller tiles. At high luminance levels the shape of the tiles does not seem to be important, but at moderate luminance levels ornamental shapes and clusterings are rejected in office or working environment while in residential environments they are more accepted. For the off-state appearance, a milky diffuse surface is accepted better, especially in office environment where a more neutral appearance is required. However, this result is not very reliable since there were challenges in setting up a realistic room simulation.

For the emissive white colour of the OLED, cool white (6500 K) has been clearly rejected, even for office environment where 4000 K was the favoured colour temperature. For residential environment the acceptable range was from warm white (3000 K) to neutral white (4000 K) which is good news for OLED technology because OLEDs show their best luminous efficacy at low colour temperatures.