The week that was 22-26th August 2016

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The week that was 22-26th August 2016

Singapore – Perth – Singapore, Weekend 27-28 August 2016

A short week in the office in Perth to tie up some loose ends before my upcoming month-long break. Not too many meetings, so mostly able to work “in peace” on a number of presentations due in the coming week! The reality is that putting together presentations require focus and attention and in my busy office in Singapore I get little respite being continuously engaged with my team, visitors or other. In Perth I am a bit “out of the way” and have a better control of my time. As I write this blog I have managed to finish all my presentations to my satisfaction and can start my weekend (and flying back to Singapore) in relative peace. I will still have Monday morning in my Singapore office before jetting off to Shanghai and thereafter Istanbul and then off to my break in France.

SILF
My first focus was to finish my presentation for the Shanghai International Lighting Fair, which starts this coming Wednesday. I spent much of the last few months I coordination sponsors and speakers and because it is our first major event in which we involve international lighting designers and manufacturers as speakers and booth participants. For that reason I felt compelled to put in the extra mile to make sure we have an outstanding booth and speaker program. Everything is now organised, done and dusted, the booth looks great (on paper, cant wait to see it and report on it next week) and the only thing left really was to finish my presentation. After all I am one of the speakers as well gracefully sponsored by Iguzzini. My talk focusses on “The challenges of lighting public art works in an urban environment” and includes some of my personal experiences in getting the lighting right through visual mock ups (artworks have a way of being created on the go by artists) to make sure our lighting concept actually works. The other main challenges in public art works is that they are generally funded by public money and are installed in the public domain, which means they are subject to government and public scrutiny and have to comply with a flurry of quality and operational health and safety standards.

Masterplan
The Singapore masterplan I am working on at the moment requires a lot of advance thinking and anticipation. The Singapore government does not issue many directives, but are always ready with heaps of comments with high expectations on the team’s deliveries. Advance notice for meetings is on a week to week basis and sometimes adhoc, so being ready and prepared is crucial to stay “in the race”. I had anticipated the next “call-up” and when the request came we just had to put the finishing touch to the updates. The presentation is coming Monday so thought to have the whole week to do the updates but got a surprise request to submit for review by Thursday. Not surprisingly I worked till late on Wednesday but was able to sent it out as requested. It is not so much about the contents, we know what needs to go in, it is most of all abut the presentation. People have expectations and most of them (government review panel) are not really lighting experts so formatting the presentation into a professionally looking, easy to understand presentation requires quite some graphic and visualisation skills. Pictures tell a thousand words so rather than summing up all the design guidelines in “boring words” the challenge is to mould that into cool looking images. On Friday we got “clearance”, all good! Phewww!

Watertown lighting design
The last presentation that needed completion by this weekend was my lighting concept presentation for Xitang water town located just outside Shanghai. We promised a major presentation after last months’ meeting mix-up (we thought it was just a kick off meeting after just having been appointed, while the client was expecting a major presentation). I think we put together a nice presentation with a very strong concepts revolving on light and shadow, a moment in time, very much in style with the location and Chinese tradition. But again it is very much about visualising the conceptual thinking through images. What would we do without Photoshop, Google or Pinterest these days!

Enjoy your weekend…