The art of communication

Dominic Meyrick’s New Year’s resolution is to get the lighting industry speaking with one voice to get across the message to the construction industry and clients that good lighting belongs at the core of building design.

A New Year and a new resolution: I will communicate better.

This is a common request from everyone I know. Not that I should talk more - definitely not that - but that I should learn to express myself more clearly, rather than expecting others to guess what is in my head. This criticism could apply to the lighting design community at large. We need to communicate better, not among ourselves but to the wider construction industry and the domestic community about the benefits of good lighting in terms of design, the visual impression of spaces, comfort and energy efficiency. I know this is an old chestnut but a ‘one vision’ approach to lighting still eludes us, with the industry relying on lone individuals or one-off initiatives within various lighting bodies to get the ‘message’ across to a wider audience.

To be applauded are individuals such as Barrie Wilde, who gives talks to schoolchildren on lighting, and my favourite club, the Lighting Education Trust, run by Hugh Ogus, which brings the industry together to agonise about and support educational initiatives concerning lighting. I have to confess I sometimes feel there is too much navel-gazing and backslapping and not enough concerted effort to engage with the outside world. The cracks appear when the industry needs to respond to things such as the latest Part L consultation paper. We should be able to speak as one and respond to its recommendations in a way the world can understand, showing we have something to contribute to the debate.

To give an example of how bad it is: I recently went for a project interview, where the client regarded me as being too much of a designer, too ‘fluffy bunny’ for the project. Me! I work for one of the biggest consulting engineering firms in the country! I heard that another firm didn’t win a job because the same client team thought the contender wasn’t ‘designery’ enough. My issue here is not the labels, but the client’s failure to see past personal preferences. What this shows is that good lighting is still seen as ‘nice to have’, rather than ‘essential’. It is too much driven by individuals, rather than by a collective understanding of the need for good lighting in all aspects of the built environment. Take consulting engineering, take architecture, take structural engineering - no one would go ahead with a construction project unless these professionals were in place.

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