Lighting

The history of the DVN Workshops started in 2009, during the economic crisis. The theme at that time was “In today’s crisis situation, how can lighting suppliers work differently with car makers to develop innovations in technologies and cost reduction?”. Just 18 experts and managers were present and most of them are still our luminaries in todays lighting community: Wolfgang Huhn, Thorsten Warwel, Ingolf Schneider, Michael Hamm, Prof. Khanh, Kamislav Fadel, Rainer Neumann, Jürgen Antonitsch, Claus Allgeier, Ralf Schäfer, Jean-Paul Charret, Jens Fisher, and DVN Founder and President Hector Fratty, to name the majority.

We emphasised common points of consensus amongst all participants:

• Safety without style is not enough. Users do not consider lights as just safety systems, but also for style and design perception.
• Regulations are too complicated and not understandable by most of the organisations who have to deal with them.
• LEDs carry a good image of advanced technology and we have to use them to the maximum practicable degree.

These points are today easily understood but were not at that time. For this reason this first DVN Workshop was fruitful and the participants convinced DVN to continue organising such workshops.