DOE Seeks Information On High Efficiency General Service Lamps

The Emerging Technologies (ET) Program of the United States Department of Energy Building Technologies Office is seeking information from the public on incandescent lamps in general illumination applications.

The ET Program supports applied research and development for technologies and systems that contribute to reductions in building energy consumption and helps to enable cost-effective, energy-efficient technologies to be developed and introduced into the marketplace. The following are key areas of interest:

1. Incandescent lamps that currently do not have a suitable replacement lamp meeting or exceeding 45 lumens per watt (lm/W).
2. Gaps in technology that impede (or would likely impede) the design, development and future sale of greater than or equal to 45 lm/W replacement lighting products

You can download the Request For Information here.

Design Is A Process, Not Just A Product

I often tell my students that design is as much a process as it is a product. Even so, they (and some of my clients) sometimes want to go from first meeting to finished design in one step. I suppose one could do that, but the result wouldn’t be a thoughtfully appropriate design, it would just be fixture selection. The difference lies in the early part of the design process where we gather information about the project and the expectations of the stakeholders, followed by an analysis of that information towards the stated goals of the project. Only after completing those two critical steps can we begin the work of putting the design together and executing it. Here’s one way of looking at the entire process.Lighing-Design-Process

What Happened to IYL?

Elizabeth Donoff asks “International Year of What?” in her editorial in this month’s Architectural Lighting, and I have to agree with her.  Early last year I noted that our professional organizations showed no plans to take advantage of the International Year of Light, and indeed nothing worth mentioning happened.  The professional societies of the lighting community (IES, IALD, etc.) added the International Year of Light logo to their web sites, but that’s about all.  They held no significant events, published no important documents, and made no efforts to raise the visibility of the profession with potential employers (architects and owners) or with the public at large.  The IALD boasts that their regularly scheduled events were added to the IYL calendar, but say nothing as to what resulted, probably because the result was nothing.  Lightfair 2015 was business as usual, I saw no recognition of IYL.

The entertainment industry did no better.  United Scenic Artists Local 829, the union for theatrical designers, didn’t recognize the opportunities, nor did USITT, and at LDI (the entertainment industry equivalent of Lightfair) there was no sign that anyone knew about IYL.

As I’ve written before (see here and here, for example), and as many of us know, far too many projects are built with poor lighting because lighting design is seen as an added cost that can be avoided by having the architect, electrical engineer, or lighting sales person provide the “design” instead of a trained, professional lighting designer.  Hoping this will change won’t change this.  On an individual level, designers can educate their clients about the benefits of thoughtfully designed lighting, but it takes a larger, more expensive effort to reach those who don’t interact with lighting designers.  Only manufacturers or professional organizations have the resources.

What could they have done in 2015, or what can they do this year?  For starters, I’d like to see the IALD and/or the IES sponsor  sessions on lighting design at the annual conventions of organizations such as  AIA, ASID, and SCUP.  Let’s get in front of the decision makers and teach them about what good lighting can mean to them.  Topics such as energy efficiency, code compliance, and daylighting, as well as the more artistic and aesthetic sides of lighting design, are all appropriate and would, I think, be well attended.  If we want lighting design to be seen as an integral part of any building project we have to work at it.  Adding a logo to a web site isn’t enough.

GE To Stop Manufacturing CFLs By End Of 2016

In another example of LEDs growing dominance in the lighting industry, General Electric has announced that it is “breaking up” with CFL lamps, and that it will stop manufacturing and sales of spiral retrofit lamps in the U.S. by the end of this year.    According GE, CFLs and LEDs each accounted for about 15 percent of lamps sales last year.  The sales of LEDs are increasing and sales of CFLs are decreasing.

Who Needs A Lighting Designer? Museums and Galleries!

A few weeks ago I gave a three-hour seminar on lighting museums and galleries to the graduate students in an art curating program at a university here in New York. Condensing everything I’d like to say into less than three hours was tough. The two big questions were what to include and what to leave out. I started with a quick overview of how to think about light and lighting before moving on to basic vocabulary and some common lighting techniques. Then, since LEDs are clearly the future, even when lighting art, I moved on to an overview of both color temperature and color rendering. I talked about reference materials such as the IES Lighting Handbook, intensity and brightness ratios, and other considerations before we moved into their gallery space to use their track light system for some demonstrations.

After the whole affair a faculty member, who sat in on most of the seminar, said he had hoped I would have spent much more time talking about how to use track lights and less time on unimportant issues like design, color temperature, and color rendering (!). I was respectful, but stunned. Focusing track lights is so complex that it requires extensive demonstrations? Understanding that with LEDs the color qualities of the light vary widely, and can only be properly selected when they are understood is unimportant information? Uhh…NO. Or, as my 20 month old niece says, “no no no no.”

Yes, five or ten years ago the default light source in museums was an incandescent or halogen lamp. The color temperature difference was minor and the color rendering of both was excellent. That’s not true today. Look at the cut sheet for any museum grade track light and you’ll see that you have a choice of several color temperatures and CRI values. If ANYONE needs to understand the qualities of light that must be selected when using LED fixtures, if anyone needs to understand the affect that color temperature and CRI have on how colors are perceived, it’s certainly people involved in displaying and lighting art. To me, that means the curators of exhibits and the lighting designers they hire.

As I’ve discussed earlier, changing the color temperature of the light changes the color appearance of objects, as shown below.

Illuminated with Warm White Fluorescent Lamp
Illuminated with 3000 K light
Illuminated with Cool White Fluorescent Lamp
Illuminated with 4000 K light

The phenomenon of color consistency means that the shift in color appearance isn’t as great as one might expect or as these photos suggest, but the shifts are real. If you’ve ever bought a black garment only to discover later that it was actually dark blue you’ve experienced this shift. A similar thing happens when we compare a high CRI light source and a low CRI light source. If your work involves color perception this is basic and critical information.

Curators can be forgiven for not knowing much about this, but if they know nothing how can they collaborate with their lighting designer to show the art as they intend? Administrators and curators of museums and galleries – educate yourselves, then hire a lighting designer!

Who Needs A Lighting Designer? Schools!

Studio T+L is the theatre consultant on the theatre in a new school here in New York. During an early meeting with the architect I explained that I prefer to have the dimming and control system for the stage lighting also control the house lighting, so I’d like to schedule a meeting with the lighting designer to talk about coordinating our work.

I wasn’t surprised (although I was disappointed) to be told that the design team for this new school building doesn’t include a lighting designer. Who’s designing the lighting in the classrooms, offices, theatre and other spaces? It’s hard to say. The plan is that one of the architect’s lighting sales representatives will present them with a choice of light fixtures, the architect will select the fixtures, and the electrical engineer will lay them out and circuit them. Unfortunately, this is an all too common approach that results in mediocre lighting, at best. Here’s why…

For starters, it’s highly unlikely that the architect has a deep enough understanding of vision, visual tasks, current fixture technology, control technology, code requirements, and the lighting design requirements of educational facilities to thoroughly evaluate the lighting needs of the school and the various types of spaces that it holds. It’s much more likely that the architect is working with a possibly outdated rule of thumb such as, “Schools should be lit to 50 fc.”   The sales rep, even if he/she is capable, isn’t going to invest any time or effort in a deeper evaluation of the school’s needs because the fixture sale (not good lighting) is the goal, so meeting the architect’s requirements is all that he/she has to do. The electrical engineer is simply implementing the architect’s instructions. He/she is given the selected fixtures and told to arrange them to provide 50 fc, and make sure to cover the code requirements.   What’s missing is any thought about how the spaces will be used and the actual needs of the occupants .

I believe that design is as much a process as it is a product.  A lighting designer would not assume that all school lighting is the same, and that as long as there’s enough light the lighting will be good enough. A lighting designer would talk to the school about their present facility, and about the good and bad aspects of the current lighting. The lighting designer may consult one or more of the available guides to quality lighting design for schools such as ANSI/IES RP-3-13 Lighting for Educational Facilities, and would look for opportunities to include daylighting as one element of the overall lighting design. A lighting designer would look at the sustainability and energy efficiency aspects of the lighting system and factor that information into the overall design. A lighting designer would take the time to understand how various types of classrooms are used, and would lay out fixtures and select controls accordingly.

I’m sure that none of this is happening on this school project.

And, not just any lighting designer will do. It behooves architects to have some understanding of the lighting needs for the building types they design to make sure the lighting designers they hire doing their job.  For example, my classes at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan are held in a building that is less than five years old.  It  that was designed by a prominent architect. However, the classroom I was in last semester had terrible lighting.  The room has two rows of direct-indirect pendant fixtures. The uplight and downlight components are controlled together, and all of the fixtures are controlled by one dimmer, so all of the lighting in the room works as one. The problem? The projection screen is bathed in light that washes out the image, and there’s no way to dim or turn off only the fixtures that affect the screen. There are lighting controls by the door, but none by the instructor’s computer station, so I find myself walking back and forth across the room to make adjustments to the light as I constantly balance my students’ need to see the screen with their need to see their notebooks. This is a rookie mistake, and any experienced designer worth his or her salt should have immediately seen the potential problem and selected fixtures, a layout, and controls to avoid it, but it didn’t happen.

So, who needs a lighting designer? Schools and the architects who design them.

Light + Color Symposium Registration is Open

Registration is now open for the IES Research Symposium III, Light + Color.  I’m on one subcommittee that’s coordinating the symposium and have sat in on organizing meetings, and I can assure you that it will be a very informative three days.  The IES describes the symposium, saying “This international lighting research and application symposium will draw on the talents and expertise of the researcher, the technologist and the design professional to better understand the growing role of color in lighting from the standpoints of color vision, color perception, color preference, color metrics and color technology.”  The symposium will be April 3-5 in Gaithersburg, MD and will include tour of the color labs at NIST.  Register here.  See you there!