The LED tsunami has overwhelmed nineteen of the enormous halls of the 2011 Guangzhou edition of the Messe Frankfurt, Guangzhou lighting fair.

Like many of the projects in China, the scale of the Guangzhou show is gigantic. Big, bold, overwhelming and imposing in scale and scope. It is ambiguous, forward looking and seems to embrace the future with the enthusiasm and the confidence that characterizes the promise of a new age.

The crowds move through acre after acre, Isle after isle, stand after stand, of blindingly bright luminous displays. Twenty five hundred exhibitors present countless iterations of LED bulbs, showers of multi-colored ropes, hundreds of aluminum clad lamps, dozens of down lights, framed luminous panels and walls of fluorescent tubes glowing with the radiance of electronic diodes set in precision arrays.
I struggled to reconcile the phenomenon of the shear size and vastness of the displays of hundreds of companies selling so much of, what appeared at first glance, to be seemingly endless repetition of the products and technology.

The big name brands like Phillips, Cree, Seoul Semiconductor, Nichia, Edison and others continue to break the barriers of LED technology with developments of outstanding performance in intensity, color, and quality. Their displays featured demonstrations of advancements previewed in Milan's, Euroluce and Philadelphia's Lightfair this spring. These companies are the cornerstone of the technological revolution that is driving the electronic illumination juggernaut. We were very excited by the revolutionary advancements and the potential of the technical achievements that these innovators presented.
There are many serious smaller companies driven by the passion and prowess of innovation and the desire to execute superbly made well performing products. These companies include a range of technical and architectural lighting firms producing high quality performance integrated lighting systems to sophisticated world class landscape lighting and controls firms capable of managing huge, high profile projects of the scale of the Beijing Olympics.

To many others however, the wave is simply an opportunity to bundle available resources without having to confront the challenge of innovation or design. I realized that because so many components from heat sinks, to chips, from optics to controls are readily available from numerous suppliers. The market has made it easy for assemblers of generic parts to masquerade as primary developers of LED technology. With some experience, identifying the innovators from the packagers becomes a relatively easy task since so many of the commonly used components are recognizable in dozens of products and offered for sale by the component suppliers. If you are seeking to find the components of LED technology from chip on boards (COB) to Surface Mounted Devices (SMD), and Constant Current to Constant Voltage power drivers then you've came to the right place in the GZ lighting show.

In my search to discover unique points of view in ways to use and live with this new electronic luminance, there were a few firms demonstrating the application of LED technology in decorative or architectural lighting products with design excellence and originality.

It became apparent to me that this show was about presenting the latest technologically to challenge product and project designers with the sensibilities, insight and creativity to develop this electronic medium into new forms of an applied art.