Passionate about promoting lighting quality

How did you come to be working in lighting? Was there a ‘lightbulb’ moment?

“I initially took an apprenticeship as a trainee lighting engineer, which in those days meant that I was trained as a lighting designer, even though my official title was engineer. I could have been working on lighting solutions for bridges, office blocks, or even the inside of aircrafts, but the company I worked for were quite influential in commercial and workplace lighting, and I became very interested in the subject.

“As a service economy, the majority of people in the UK work in offices, but despite making up a large percentage of the workplaces the UK, they can sometimes be very poorly lit. I developed a strong interest in exploring how to make office lighting better.”

Why is workplace lighting so important?

“Light, lighting and the entire visual environment is fundamental to any workplace. For example, research has proven that a view out, being able to see the sky, the mid view, and the foreground, strongly influences people’s satisfaction of any interior. But as someone, I forget whom, once said, Europe is already built, and we cannot replace the millions of square feet of older building stock that have small windows and deep-plan layouts overnight. This challenge, people simply needing a connection to light and the outside, is one of many challenges for us in lighting that I am sure we could answer.

“But the answer surely isn’t the adoption of blanket lighting, or the so-called ‘panel-demic’ - flat panel recessed LED light fittings – which became the go-to solution for office lighting in the UK almost overnight. Although the LEDs provide an opportunity to save energy, there seems to be little regard for the majority of lighting quality metrics. I’m told by colleagues in Sweden that their workplace safety inspectorate recognised pretty early the problems that might arise, and effectively outlawed the one-dimensional panel-demic type approach to office workplaces – good on them.

“Going forward, I’m convinced that working in interiors without the potential for lots of light, will hold us back from being our best. We know that putting extra lighting in a factory can improve productivity and make accidents lower, but in an office environment, to prove how it influences our productivity and well-being is more of a challenge, and I am convinced that this background of disjointed and sometimes unconvincing research has held lighting back. But that might all be set to change.”

What role does circadian lighting play in this?

“Circadian effective lighting has had a faltering start but has huge potential in my view because unlike typical lighting quality metrics - illuminance, glare, brightness ratios and similar, which are often seen as simple hygiene factors - incorrect or incomplete circadian entrainment is likely to directly affect human health.

“The hard part is getting the right experts in the same room to prove it! The whole circadian subject needs super multidisciplinary input: it needs lighting specialists, it needs ocular scientists, behavioural scientists, people that understand the biological effects of light, and others…and I’m not sure how and when that might happen.

“It's a big subject, and still in its infancy, but it is being talked about a lot, and healthy building certification programmes such as the WELL Building Standard could mean we might start seeing building owners, developers, occupiers, employers and legislators starting to take it a lot more seriously.”

What are some of the challenges?

“As mentioned, it’s notoriously difficult to connect good lighting quality with persuasive outcomes like higher productivity; it’s almost impossible to measure. There’s research that hints at the connection between productivity and lighting, and there’s a lot that suggests people will be more content and comfortable, but it is at best disjointed.

“Maybe there will be a time in the future where legislation mandates circadian lighting in the office, when we can prove that people’s health is negatively affected by insufficient or poor lighting. Once we accept that better quality of lighting makes humans perform better and have healthier lives, it stands to reason that better solutions will need to be put in place.”

What do you believe will be the next innovation in terms of workplace lighting?

“The quality of light, and the focus on circadian effects has the potential to be a game changer, because it’s about health. I think we’ve got every tool we need to deliver fantastically healthy and productive workplaces – LED based luminaires that can be controlled, colours that can be varied, directional light qualities that can be adjusted, and luminaires that can deliver, efficiently.

“We’ve got all the tools, but the real innovation will be using all this in applications, to enable us to learn quickly what works. It might not sound like much of an innovation because it already exists, but really, it’s about changing attitudes: we’ve all taken lighting for granted for too long, and we know enough now to realise it’s critically important.

“It's this different mindset that will be a massive innovation for the industry. We’ve got the tools; we just need the will for people to do it.”