The week that was 8-12th May 2017

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The week that was 8-12th May 2017

France, weekend 13-14^th May 2017

Still enjoying the relaxing countryside of my retreat in the South of France, I have also been playing a bit client and project manager. While keeping a remote eye on office and project proceedings I have been overseeing some contractor works at my farmhouse. I am having a new bathroom done and this time rather than consultant I am the client! An interesting time as dealing with countryside workers is quite a different experience than dealing with the big project sites we are used too. Everything has a different pace and priorities can change by the day! On arrival it took a few days before they actually came claiming they had to deal with some emergencies first. But aside from a royal lunch time (they knock off around noon and are back around 2.30 pm 🙂 ) they do a pretty nice and professional job. When they leave at the end of the day they duly clean the work site and leave it neatly behind. Most of all they are friendly and always ready for a chat! The quality of the workmanship is excellent, very professional…certainly compared to some of the shitty (and dirty) work I often see on our project sites in Asia!

We are really pleased to get an insight in how our Jakarta team is going about their work. Galih’s team is young, but very eager to learn and by the looks of it they have the same family/ team spirit as we have in Singapore…we support and help each other! It is great to see that Wulan, this week’s blogger, is putting in such big effort to write about his experiences! As English is not their native language the blog efforts by our Indonesian team are even more appreciated. The blog has been edited for grammar but overall it is pretty much Wulan’s story!
Introduction: Wulan Ayunda Putri, Lighting Designer

First of all, I would like to thank Mr. Martin for giving me this opportunity to write for the blog. First I would like to start this blog by telling how I entered life as a lighting designer. My educational background is Interior Architecture and I started falling in love with lighting when I got lighting lessons in college. Since then I always felt that lighting is the soul of a building. From my friend I heard about KLD, a lighting design company that has an internship program for students. So with without thinking I immediately applied for an internship there. At the same time I also did an internship, writing for my undergraduate thesis. Of course my topic for my undergraduate thesis was also about lighting: “Lighting Effect for Library Café”. After I graduated from my college, I went back to join KLD for work. So many thanks to Mr. Galih for giving me chance to join KLD Indonesia. I have been working at KLD for 2 years now and I am really excited about this job and doing lighting projects here!

Jakarta Citi Plan – South Quarter

This is the first project that I handled as a lighting designer; the Jakarta Citi Plan office project. The client for this project, Citi Bank, have specific lighting design guidelines which they want us to follow. In the process I learned many things about lighting design from their guidelines, such as about lighting sensors, lighting control and lux standards for many type of rooms. As with many other projects, we started this project by developing the concept; we create 3D rendering images, search for 3D references, find the suitable luminaires, etc.

Of specific importance for this project as part of the lighting design process is to do lux level calculation, to ensure that our design will achieve what the client need and comply with their standards. Since the project has short timeline, our challenge was to find suitable luminaires that were readily available from the local market.

It was hard to handle this project for me as a fresh new lighting designer with hardly enough knowledge about lighting and with little experience in projects! I faced many challenges during did this project, problems with fitting installation, problems with how to control lighting, how coordinate and ensure the luminaires would arrived on time to the site, etc. It was crucial to have good coordination with all the other consultant we worked with on this project.

Thanks to Mr. Galih’s support and guidance and together with my colleagues who helped me to realise this project, we managed to finish it! The last process of the project is supervision, where we check the lighting effects and also did some lux level measurement to confirm that the rooms have the desired lighting and achieve the client’s standard.

When I finally saw the end result of our design completed on a real site it made me so proud! Most of all I learned so many things from this project about lighting design and how to manage a project that it will help me in my next projects!

Wulan

Some of our 3D rendering for concept