"Everything can be a lamp with LumiLor," writes Darskide Scientific, the company that developed it. LumiLor is a patented coating that glows when a current is applied to it. (And yes, it's safe to touch, as it's sealed and insulated.) The brilliance of the system is that since it's water-based, you can load it up into any paintspraying system or airbrush and you're off to the races. Here's how the process is applied:

...it seems obvious that once furniture designers, environments designers, interior designers and architects learn about the product, we'll start to see some truly revolutionary objects and spaces being created. "Imagine taking any object of any shape, contour or substrate," the company says, "and having it emit light specifically where you paint it, without changing its form or function."

Since the stuff can be applied to metal, wood, plastic, glass and even flexible vinyl sheets, I'm sure the furniture and lighting designers among you already have the gears turning. But let's look at some examples of a potential application by peeping these concept images for the movie Tron: Legacy:

Now forget that those are renders and that the movie was primarily done in CG. Let's say you're the chief designer on-set and you're responsible for building those images out as physical sets, or even a client's actual apartment. You're undoubtedly thinking about how to design and construct all of the housings to hold the lights, what material you'll use to diffuse the light and hide the hotspots, the structures you'll need to suspend the fixtures, how to wire it up, et cetera. With LumiLor (assuming you can generate the lumens required) you'd still have the task of running wiring and designing electronics to light different quadrants, but there's the key distinction that all of the light-emitting surfaces could be flat. You wouldn't have to build up the floor or drop the ceiling beyond what you'd need to fit wiring, with fixtures no longer a concern.

As it stands LumiLor requires application by a trained pro, but I imagine as the material proliferates, more and more people will sign up for the training.

You can learn more about the stuff here.