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Repetition

Mumbai, 25th March 2010

Travelled to India today to attend to some design coordination meetings. India, like China has that big buzz of things going on…A huge growing economy with obviously many opportunities for lighting designers. The lighting community here is growing fast with many new homegrown talented lighting designers, some of whom I have met.  

In today’s blog I want to talk about repetition. With so many new projects seeing the daylight, many project developments are competing in nature (hotels, commercial developments, etc) there is a risk of design repetition. Repetition in design is something that creeps up on you without us realising it. Sometimes driven by deadlines and unrealistic clients we “rush” through the design studies and in the process fall back into using previous concepts. If it worked before why re-invent the wheel, right?  It is quite common in architecture…haven’t we all not seen a  building design that looks just like one you have seen in another city or country? Lighting design isn’t any different.

Because lighting results can vary enormously due to ever different architectural finishes and many other variables, we do fall back on previous designs we know work. But that is part of our experience as a designer, isn’t it? That is often the proven experience and expertise that clients hire us for. We sometimes even get specific requests from our clients to reproduce concepts that they have seen somewhere else. Don’t we all use our own library of project images or Google (sorry not in China anymore .. :)) (*) images of relevant lighting effects to illustrate our designs?

I subscribe to the idea that there are very few real innovative designs and that most of the “new” designs are taking existing concepts and use them in a modified way or in a different environment.  

(*) For those not aware, Google has pulled out of the China market yesterday, reportedly as it does not want to subject its site to censorship of its search engine…

25. March 2010 by Martin Klaasen
Categories: lighting of the future | Leave a comment

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