The week that was…26-30th November 2018

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The week that was…26-30th November 2018

Shanghai – Singapore – Perth, Weekend 1-2nd December 2018

We are approaching the end of the year and as always there are many things to complete or tie up before the holidays. I came back from Shanghai having participated as judge to the inaugural Magnolia Lighting Design awards, had a short stop over in Singapore filled with meetings before moving on to Perth where I will stay working from our office till middle of next week.

Magnolia Awards
The inaugural Magnolia Lighting Design awards are curated by the SIES (Shanghai Illuminating engineering Society) and saw more than 300 project entries! To add weight to the value of the competition highly regarded personalities in the lighting industry were invited to help judge the results of this competition. Professors of the Fudan University’s lighting department, the president of the China Illuminating engineering society, the vice chairman of the SIES as well as international lighting designers like Murray Robson and myself. I have to give credit to the professionalism of the judging. After two rounds of preselection the shortlist contained close to 50 projects. Projects were judged on criteria such as relevance, sustainability, innovation, technical qualities and implementation. Scores attributed to each of them, but not after each shortlisted project was actually visited by the team. I visited some as well and it was specifically interesting to see how some of the submission photo’s actually looked better then the reality. Very few actually match up in reality…!
After the scores were tallied clear winners emerged (sorry cant share that yet…next week 7th December is the official awards night). It was great to see that all head judges scored fairly consistently with very little discrepancies in our assessments. Awards will be given in three categories, 1st, 2nd and 3rd price or if you want awards of excellence, merit and commendations. I was impressed by the high quality of the projects submitted. Look forward to the award night next week where I will be present to hand out some awards and do a little keynote speech…

LDoT partners
Our list of partners and collaborators is growing and we had a few further meetings this week work on some specific projects. Integrating IoT data infrastructures into lighting or applying them in general is still very much a virgin territory, no-one really knows what is the right way, there are no standards yet, whatever goes, goes. Figuring out what is the best and educating our clients fairly and honestly is a big challenge as we very much rely on what manufacturers and system developers tell us mixed with our own intelligence and research. The lack of use cases makes all ROI figures really hypothetical and hence we are all more or less in pilot project stages to figure out exactly how and what…

Sorting the IoT cowboys from the “good guys” is part of the process we are going through. The interesting thing is that listening to one developer/provider talking about their competition provides a different understanding than to listen to that “competitor” himself. We did just that this week. It is a very educating process, but one we have to go through to, to professionally advise our clients and understand what is actually being offered.

Atlas II
During my half day in Singapore I did find the time to meet the client for a night time visit to the proposed Atlas II location. The reason being that the new sister bar will also have some outdoor seating, hence understanding the environment of the outdoor terrace and the visual link between indoor and outdoor was important. Always good to make sure we are all on the same page when it comes to developing the concept.

Raine Square
On my arrival in Perth the next day I went straight to site to assist the contractor to whom we are sub-consulting for this project to fine tune the façade lighting. While we much appreciate the confidence of the electrical contractor in our services, it also became clear that our limited involvement (mostly concept and specifications) laid bare once more the need to always be involved from start to finish. While the contractor did a good job the lack of testing and visual mock ups that we always recommend showed. We managed to tweak the façade lighting and set some rules for the lighting in terms of mixing effects, but in the back of our minds we know that if we would have been involved in the full process we could have made sure the exact right light fixtures and lighting effects would have been achieved. While the client seems to love the outcome, I know it can be so much better…

Manufacturer meetings
As always we embrace the interaction with our suppliers to get ourselves updated on the latest and newest developments in the industry. Our Singapore team visited the Signify application centre while our Australia team visited the newly established Unios headquarters in Perth. Talking to the people behind the products and seeing, experiencing the behind the scene supports they can give is extremely important. In our line of work the people behind the products are as important as the products themselves.

PLDC video
Finally we saw the long awaited PLDC mood video come out this week, expertly put together by my daughter Kyra through her Kyramedia company. The video provides an excellent look back on an event that by all accounts was highly successful.

lease enjoy the official PLDC 2018 video here

Enjoy the weekend