And you get paid for that?

10 February 2011

The terrifying thought occurred to me the other day that I’ve been in the lighting industry for 20 years. Aside from feeling like Basil Fawlty when confronted with his own mortality (“What was that?” “That was your life, mate!”) the thought made me reflect on the how things have changed, or not as the case may be, during this time in this profession that most people have never heard of.

When I left (Newcastle?) Polytechnic and got a job as a ‘lighting designer’, I didn’t even know what it was. I worked for a lighting company in the days when schemes were done on drafting film with Rotring pens, with scalpels for scratching out mistakes, and the only computer we used did Isolux plots, took two days to calculate and sat in its own air-conditioned room.

I can still remember the first lighting ‘scheme’ I did (and I use that word in the very loosest sense).

My boss said: “Start here, space these columns at 15m apart, staggered to either side of the road, then put on a legend with part number, copy it, and send it to the electrical engineer.” Oh, for those heady days of high art!

Now everything is computer based; I have a mobile phone; there are programmes like Photoshop, AutoCAD, Rhino (thought it was an animal but hey ho) and calculations are done in minutes. Still, at least some things never change – still no-one seems to know about lighting design, what it is and why you would be paid to do it. More importantly there is still no clear way into the profession – it is still insular and struggles to engage with other professions and the general public.

All professions have their own language and their own in-jokes:

Q: How many lighting designers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: What do you mean bulb!?

But to fear, as I did, that this very magazine, in its old guise as LEN, would end up in that most frightening of places – the guest publication for Have I Got News for You – shows that lighting designers, or to use the more recently coined term for the wider industry punter – lighting professionals, still have a way to go before lighting design is a recognised and established career.

At the moment, like a badly fitting pavement slab, people just stumble over it. This is borne out by the fact that since I started I have met all manner of fellow lighting designers who have come into the profession in all sorts of ways – from architecture to electrician, from theatre to psychology. And just to remind ourselves just how weird it really is, and to show how far we have yet to travel, let me quote my own son, then aged seven:

“Dad what do you do in your job?”

“Well, I decide where to put the lights in a building.”

“And once you have decided where they go, do you get on a ladder and put them in the ceiling?!