Right or Right Now!
Australia 3rd March 2010
Sometimes we are put for a decision to do it “right” or to do it “right now”. With right I mean to make sure everything is done as it should be including the quality standards that we envisage the project has to achieve. However projects are often in a time squeeze that may not allow all the time in the world to do it right! Most clients are pushing us to finish things “yesterday” and with very tight deadlines, often driven by commercial motives, we find ourselves scrambling for time and taking shortcuts just to make it within the imposed time. I know what you are saying, but the reality, certainly in Asia, is like that. Easier said than done!
Right now with the Shanghai World Expo to be opened in less than two months, the pressure is on for the many projects that have to be completed by the time the fireworks hit the sky at the opening ceremony. I recently spoke to one of my colleagues in Singapore involved in one of the Integrated Resorts which also have enormous government backed pressure to open sooner rather than later. He told me the pressure was close to unbearable to the level of wanting to walk away rather than be forced to deliver unfinished or sub standard work. The problem is that you can’t really win in these situations, so most of the time you have to bite the bullet and try make the best out of it.
The upside (if it all turns out well, which is exactly the issue here of course…) is a very happy client who is bound to use or recommend you again. However the downside (with far greater risks) is that it does not work out as well and despite the many warnings you may have issued to the client, an unsatisfactory end result will still have them pointing the finger at you.
Doing it right or doing it right now… seems a bit of a catch 22 situation 🙂
Lighting rules of thumb
Australia, 2nd March 2010
There is not one solution to a lighting problem… there are many! As I discussed the lighting design of one of our hotels projects today, I was asked the question by one of my staff if there is any rule of thumb in applying wattages and lamp types depending on the ceiling height in a space. It seems an innocent question to which most would expect a simple answer.
But the experienced designers amongst us will agree that there are many solutions and not really a rule of thumb to go by. The only thing that I can come up with is that the solutions main parameters will be influenced by the selected wattage (or lumens/watt as a probably better yardstick) and the light distribution at origin (the light fitting producing the light)… At the other (receiving) end there are the required lighting levels and tasks or objects that need illumination. Top that up with the desired mood, theme or ambiance and you have a large mix of variables that will influence the design and thus the light fitting (lamp type and wattage) selection process.
To me the design process nearly always starts with what I want to achieve. Uniformly diffuse lighting, indirect reflected light, focused accent lighting…? Bright or soft, cool or warm light? Maybe even some dynamic sequencing? That brings us to the key, which is understanding what lighting really is to achieve. This in turn should come out of our interpretation of the clients brief. Then only we can start setting up the criteria to which the lighting has to comply with.
So is there a rule of thumb…no not really. The only ones that apply are the lighting definitions that tell you how the variables relate to each other 🙂
Life is light!
Australia, 1st March 2010
Officially, today is the start of Autumn in Australia. While the West coast (Perth) celebrated that with the hottest day in years, the East coast (Sydney) had its coldest day in years. But overall Australia had its hottest summer in years…a sign of global warming?
Today’s subject is a bit “light hearted”. Light has become such an integral part of our life that even in our daily language we use light and lighting as ways to express ourselves. We use the term “illuminating” to indicate that we learned something or “brilliant” to express something that “outshines” the rest, and then there is “light at the end of the tunnel” to indicate that the worst is over and things are getting better! In general light is synonymous with something positive and uplifting. Having “bright ideas” or a “bright future” are typical examples of positive metaphors. Reversely the lack of light, like “being in the dark”, expresses negative moods or situations.
“Light” talk also comes in colors, such as “seeing red” or being “green with envy” or talk until you are “blue in the face”…yes, the full RGB spectrum… 🙂 Even speed is captured by lighting by being “lightning quick”. Light of course has a big religious meaning. How many people have not “seen the light”?
So “let there be light” in your lives!
“Free” lighting design by others
Australia, 28th February 2010
On my Sunday of reflection I would like to touch on what I call the “other lighting designers”. People who offer lighting design, generally “free”, as part of other services. I am triggered by this because of an advertisement I read in today’s news paper where a real estate company offers a home lighting and consultation package at no extra costs to potential buyers of new to build homes. Home building packages are quite popular in Australia and RE companies are looking to promotional offers to attract more potential buyers. This particular offer includes a lighting plan, all light fittings and energy efficient globes. They go as far as offering a so called “green” switch which will enable you to conveniently switch off all designated lights with a flick of the switch. Do you notice the use of the “green” trend to appeal to the public…add in a bit of social consciousness, it always helps…
We all know lighting design does not come for free…someone has to spend time to do it. But it is a fact of life that it is marketed as “free” as the costs have been integrated somewhere else and while it may look free, you pay for it in other ways. As professional designers this often is a difficult thing to compete with. I remember we were competing on a job with an electrical consultant who was offering the lighting design as well. When asked to break down their actual fee for lighting design it was quoted as a ridiculously low fee (it was about 1/5 of our fees). It was obvious that the real fees where hidden in their overall M&E fees, creating an unfair advantage as we were providing the lighting design services only. The client was blindsided and we lost the job.
We find other “lighting designers” as part of manufacturers, suppliers, interior designers, architects, etc. We may look as a bad looser, but the reality of things is that if the lighting design scope of work is the same, the competing fees should not be that far off.
The “Good Guys”
Australia, 27th February 2010
In Australia we have a chain of stores that call themselves the “Good Guys”. Not sure if they exist overseas, but they pride themselves on their excellent service, excellent pricing smiling attitude and no questions asked quality warranty. I have bought some things there over the years and always come out a happy customer.
As I am working on preparing another fee proposal, I am pondering about the client. I have not worked with this client before and with little to go on, I need to apply common sense in assessing the business risk of working with this client. We all know the horror clients that we come across from time to time. However most of the time we don’t know until we are well and truly on our way in a project. Of course we try to protect ourselves as good as possible through our contracts terms and conditions, but there has to be some trust and respect along the way in any business relationship to work, right?
What we look for is a client that understands the process of design, respects our scope of work, your expertise and most of all your time (!) and when due, pays promptly. Horror clients will do basically none of the above, abuse their power and where possible push you to the limit. They will always find an excuse to delay payment … When that happens (and trust me that happens more often then you would like!) you need to assess whether to walk away, confront or just go with it…not always a clear cut decision! To avoid losses, it becomes crucial to start any project with a down payment for our own protection.
So will this be a “Good Guy”, I don’t know, time will tell.
Design for the “outback”
Perth, 26th February 2010
Just returned from a trip to “outback” Australia…well not really, but Kalgoorlie (a little town 500km east of Perth) is certainly not your example of a vibrant big city life and its outer suburbs are certainly close to “Australian outback” living. The famous and historical gold diggers town nowadays boosts a population of at least 30,000 people, a far cry from the more than 200 odd thousand that populated the area in hey days of the gold rush!
We are involved in the lighting of some of their sporting facilities and yesterday during the day and night we inspected the site for better understanding. I make it a point to always visit a prospective site (and similar for comparison if possible) at night to have a good feel of the night time situation.
Now it is pretty dark out there with the moon and stars out in force in the cloudless night. But there are other “things” out in force at night and these are things we often overlook in our design. I am talking about the insects (mosquito’s and other flying beasts…!) but also animals such as kangaroos, rabbits, bats, etc, etc…
Lighting attract insects certainly in warm climates… so for instance practicing on a driving range at night with flying insects around you is not really ideal! Standing near a pole where the floodlights attract and burn insects which subsequently rain down on you is less then pleasant. So we need to know which lights (wavelengths) attract less insects then others!
These are just the insects, but there are also the night “marsupials” that like putting their teeth in things like cables, ducts, wires, etc. Some “animals” (birds, spiders, et) like to find comfort and protection in little holes and niches that we may have in-avertedly created with our lighting installation.
Every corner of this earth has its own little creatures that react to light at night. The best lighting designs are not the ones that work well on paper but that work well with the reality of life!
Judging designs
Perth, 25th February 2010
Today I wrote in a view words my comments on the award winning designs from interior designers that have submitted projects for the International Ring Awards organized by the ICIAD (the International Council of Interior Architect Designers). I am one of the international judges, but the only lighting designer amongst architects and interior designers that form the judging panel. One of the reasons being that they also wanted someone with an experienced eye on the energy friendliness, “green” use of lighting technologies as part of the overall concepts, etc. The awards ceremony will be held in Hong Kong later next month.
While I could only judge the entries form photographs and occasional video clips (it took me a while to work through that lot I can tell you!) it was a very interesting experience. I don’t get to judge other peoples work often other then just as an observer when looking around at other peoples work in the public arena.
I obviously only look at it from my own lighting design experience which very much revolves about the visual impressions and experience I get from being in that space or looking at the objects I have to judge. Hence innovative use of space or materials has a far lesser impact on me unless it combines really well with innovative and clever use of lighting for maximum visual impact. As a result I found myself appreciating the designs totally different then my fellow judges…interesting, isn’t it? I assume my invitation to be a judge on the panel was based exactly on my different angle of appreciation.
It just shows that we look at things in a pre-conditioned way, through lenses that have been formed and colored over the years by the accumulation of our daily experiences in life!
Lighting catalogues
Perth, 24th February 2010
As lighting designers we rely heavily on our experience when specifying products for our lighting designs. The more experienced we are the better we also can read manufacturers product catalogues. Suppliers that have been around for a long while are experienced and generally know their “stuff”. But often we get suppliers or manufacturers agents to visit us with their latest product catalogue without really knowing what they are actually offering. It would n’t be the first time I get a young sales person over in the office that does not know the difference between lux or lumens.
Product selling is quite different from application selling! We need to understand primarily what a product does, not necessarily what all the technical parameters are! We think in lighting effects, not in technical units…at least I don’t.
So a good lighting catalogue (and sales person) should really help you in assessing lighting effects rather than citing a long list of all its products technical features. Don t get me wrong, we need the photo metric data as experienced lighting designers we can translate the curves and diagrams in probable lighting effects. But actual lighting effect pictures (with the actual fitting, not other fittings and non achievable effects as we often see in “dodgy” catalogues) will help us better understand what to expect. Application selling is also about promoting the unique features that set the product apart from others and that can benefit the lighting effects and lighting concept that I am after. I am selling my lighting concept to my client so I also need those special lighting features that will help make my client happy!
I know that making lighting catalogues is a tedious job, having been involved myself making one in my Philips time! The trend seems to be that the bigger the catalogue the better, but to me the simpler the better, as long as it captures the essence of the product…Don’t forget catalogues are sales tools in the first place, not necessarily a design tool!
CRI and LED
Perth, 23rd February 2010
We are of course well familiar with the color rendering index (CRI) for traditional white light sources like halogen, metal halide or fluorescent. But when it comes to the CRI for white LED’s we are still much in unchartered waters it seems. Note there is a difference between white created by RGB LED and the so called phosphor coated white LED’s
As we are studying the white LED’s for application in our projects Iam trying to understand what actually is the “state of the art” in regards to white LED’s. It is obvious that all the rosy talk about life time, performance and colour characteristics were a bit over-optimistic to say the least. Now most manufacturers are in damage control and start to issue more “reliable” information about the LED performances. From the manufacturers information I find that from the commercially available white LEDs the CRI is somewhere between 70 and 90. Contrary to RGB LED’s creating white with a CRI of only between 25 to 70 or thereabouts.
Though dated 2007, a report prepared by the CIE’s technical committee investigating the color rendering of white LED light sources, concluded, and I quote: “the CRI is generally not applicable to predict the colour rendering rank order of a set of light sources when white LED light sources are involved in this set.” The academic studies and visual appraisal experiments with observers showed there was a poor correlation between the rankings by observation and the calculated values.
I understand that the CIE and probably other lighting researchers are investigating this issue with the aim to come up with a new system to replace eventually the current CRI. While still useful for traditional light sources it is obvious we should be mindful when using the CRI for white LED light sources.
Lux meters
Perth, 22nd February 2010
Yesterday I mentioned about lighting levels. We all know that we need a lux meter to measure it. But how useful is it? We human’s actually don’t see light, we see reflections! Lux meters measure the amount of light falling on a surface (lux being the lumens per m2), so really, unless we understand what lux levels mean in relation to what we actually see it is pretty useless. Ok… it gives us an indication about the amount of light that reaches a particular surface but unless we understand the nature of the objects, materials and finishes that reflects the light it does not mean much.
Ever measured the lighting levels on a white polished stone, then on a matt piece of black leather? Assuming the same position, the results are the same, right? But as the reflections are totally different, the visual impressions are totally different . Add to that our eye sensitivity in relation to the peak light source emissions and we have another parameter that is not recorded by a lux meter!
There are luminance meters (quite expensive) that actually record candelas/m2, the reflected light in a particular direction, which are far more accurate in telling us what we will see. These are highly technical meters and rarely used in architectural lighting design, but more in “technical” environments such as road lighting for instance.
As I mentioned once before, we design our lighting for people… not for lux meters! However if we could measure light the way we actually see by having a “lux” meter equipped with artificial rods and cones as measuring devices, wouldn’t that be cool? 🙂
The long awaited book compilation of Martin's first year of blogging is available. Order now.
Feedspot Top 100 Lighting Blogs