A designer’s lament

22 June 2011

So LEDs are going to save us! Well, thank goodness for that because something had to, writes Dominic Meyrick, principal, Hoare Lea Lighting

My thoughts this month turn to luminaires and lamps and the symbiotic relationship between lighting designers and manufacturers. When it works, it works well, and when it doesn’t work, their products just don’t get specified by us.

Looking at manufacturers there tends to be three basic ways that they try to sell their products to us. Firstly there is the visual look – this product will usually take the name of a well-known designer or architect; this is supposed to woo us into specifying it, presumably on the pretext that we have to appease our architect and client by its ‘good looks’.

Secondly there is the ‘how it’s made’ approach, which encompasses cost, ease of installation, materials and so on.

Finally, there is the ‘technology’ approach, which includes LORs, optical control (everything from vacuum metalised super pure reflectors to micro prism technology), light distribution and, of course, the ever-seductive ‘new’ lamp.

Coming from a product design background you would think that I would be most wooed by the first approach. However, it shows how much this lighting profession has changed me, because if it looks good but does nothing, as inevitably most of these products do, then it will stay as some product manager’s white elephant.

The second approach is also interesting. Of course we care about how the product is made, but this is not going to work if a luminaire is basically just a bucket with a lamp in it, as so many are.

So that just leaves the third and final approach: the technology one. Now this approach is my particular weakness but if I had been looking for a cure I have found it in the feeling of fatigue that descends when people talk to me about LEDs.

Now, lighting designers don’t make anything and myself and my colleagues are eternally grateful to the large number of companies that supply us with information on ‘what’s hot and what’s not’ as we struggle to do our best for our clients. However, with the good comes the bad and no recent technological breakthrough illustrates this better than the LED’s transformation from indicator to illuminator.

The lighting industry as a whole is struggling to come to terms with a light source that could sound the death knell for a whole range of products and lamp sources.Such a level of innovation is a big change and holds much promise, but how many times have I come back from a light fair with the feeling that there is nothing new under the sun? Granted, this sounds slightly grudging, but in my opinion, LED is failing to deliver innovative solutions and there is nothing new in the traditional luminaires – those using fluorescents and HID – because they are being swamped by LEDs.

When you add in the fact that much of the information available about LEDs is misleading – for example, that surrounding accurate lamp life and lumen depreciation (in the luminaire please), binning and heat management – I think my frustrations are justified. And when we do raise questions about some feature or other on a new product it seems the words: ‘But it’s LED…’ are expected to make our objections evaporate.

So, here’s the deal. Lighting designers and manufacturers need each other. However let’s stay humanly symbiotic. The definition of this is: ‘a cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship between two people or groups’.

Let us not fall into the natural world definition of symbiotic: ‘animals or plants of different species that is often, but not always, of mutual benefit.’