Office Lighting for the Future at LightSave Summit

1 December 2010 | Updated: 21 December 2010 11:04 am

The second forum at LightSave Summit saw the expert panel wrestle with office lighting of the future. Richard Brass presents the discussion on Category 2, personal controls and the thorny question of bio-dynamics, sponsored by Philips.

Phil Gardner: When I see people on a train or in front of the TV with a laptop, they seem to be getting on quite adequately. Do we worry too much about the role of the VDU screen in the workplace?

Mark Ridler: Yes, we do. One of the travesties in office lighting was the Category 2 revolution – and I use the word loosely – in the 1990s, where we were designing almost entirely for machines and not for people. There have been quite a lot of studies done on glare tolerance of screens, and we’re still adhering to standards which were developed for early 1990s computer technology. We really need to start thinking about lighting for people.

Simon Erridge: The kind of workspaces people inhabit are completely different now. People have moved away from workstations in both the private sector and the public sector, where they’re as likely to create café spaces and lounge spaces in their offices. All sorts of unusual buildings have been turned into office buildings, so I think there will be an enormous change in office spaces of the future, and technology is really helping that.

Chris Peach: From a lighting point of view, I think that the offices we’re developing today need to have a flexible space for communication. This is where business is generally done, so we design these spaces to create a very stimulating environment. Generally you will find that taking light levels down and playing with the overall ambience of a space can help promote business, particularly within the larger companies where cross-pollination may not always work. Creating smaller spaces and changing the lighting, taking it out of the ceiling, can make people feel a lot more comfortable about the space they’re working in.

Mike Simpson: I have to confess I probably spent 10 years writing the standards that created Category 2 lighting, and then the next 10 years trying to stop people following it. Hopefully we’re now over that, and people are thinking much more about lighting the overall space – getting a space that’s comfortable for people to work in. We still have to make sure we don’t get bright light from screens, but the tolerance we now have on screen technology is much wider, and I think the challenge is nothing to do with reflections in screens but about trying to deliver low-energy working spaces where people can also interact.

Peter Le Manquais: There have been lots of studies that brought these standards to where they are. Working on a laptop or on a train is probably for a short period of time, but in an office you’re going to spend all day looking at a screen and the eye becomes very fatigued. So having the right standards for the lighting is really important.

Lee Gunner: In everything we do, we look at the person in that environment. We’re asking the office population to sit in an internal environment pretty much away from what we as human beings have evolved to enjoy and expect from our surroundings. The future of the modern office needs to really pick up on human nature and the biorhythms of the office population and build on that, rather than just following the tickbox approach of the lighting guides.

Mark Ridler: Because of the Category A/Category B system, the developer will create a vanilla solution. So the office today probably has an accessible ceiling with a fixed array of lighting, giving a quantum of lighting which is codecompliant, completely and utterly uniform, pretty bland and not really what we want. If you have a look at the best office spaces, they’re either refurbished for a particular client or they’re a tenant that has done a financial deal to create their own bespoke solution.

Roger Dangell: Everybody’s looking at ways of saving energy, but if the Cat A products end up in the skip, you can’t recycle the energy that’s gone into making those products. The amount of energy and resource that goes into the waste from doing this Cat A/Cat B thing is disgusting.

Kevin Grant: A big emphasis should be placed on daylighting in the modern workplace. Obviously there are energy savings available by reducing electric light, but we should think of daylight as a light source and remember what it does to humans: it makes us feel happier by promoting serotonin; it makes us feel more awake by suppressing melatonin; and if you feel happier and more awake, it’s easier to focus and be more effective and productive. The modern workplace should aim to light as much as possible using daylight.

Phil Gardner: What’s your experience of lighting for wellbeing - dynamic lighting if you like, which changes for the benefit of the occupants?

Kevin Grant: Dynamic lighting has been flirted with in the past and has been done quite badly in some cases. We’ve seen instances where occupants are very aware they’re in a building with dynamic lighting, and because of that they try to override it - they complain that it’s too bright or not bright enough. The workplace has layers of light. There’s background, then there are layers that enhance the task, and we should give occupants control of certain aspects of that.

Simon Erridge: The whole issue of local control is very important. It’s all very well to have technology doing things in the background, but people like to be able to control their environment: to open a window and shut it again or have a desk light they can turn on and off.

Kevin Grant: You can have individual control on aeroplanes with the person sitting next to you, so there’s no reason why you can’t have multi-source luminaires at high level or at low level that allow us to increase or decrease the lighting level on the task in an efficient way.

Mark Ridler: I’m slightly nervous about bio-dynamic lighting, because I think we now have research that incontrovertibly proves there is an effect on the human physiology through light. I just don’t think anyone really knows what that impact is. You can change the melatonin levels, but why would you want to? Should we be changing people’s body clocks? I think the best biodynamic lighting that we have available - for nothing, incidentally - is daylight. Rather than tinkering with the artificial lighting without really knowing what the effect’s going to be, we should really be concentrating on using the natural light to do that for us.

Phil Gardner: Philips has been doing quite a bit of research into dynamic lighting and well-being over the last few years. What’s happening there?

Mike Simpson: In the office environment, it’s very difficult to measure productivity. The studies that we’ve been involved with have mainly shown that some sort of change in the lighting, whether it’s changing the lighting level or colour temperature, tends to produce improvements in some of the softer things - the way people feel. They feel better in an environment where there’s some change in the lighting rather than it being purely flat.

Participants at the Philips forum on office lighting:

● Phil Gardner, head of design, Greyblue lighting design

(facilitator)

● Mark Ridler, lighting director, BDP

● Simon Erridge, director, Bennetts Associates architects

● Kevin Grant, leader of Happold Lighting, Buro Happold

● Roger Dangell, director, MEIT Associates

● Chris Peach, designer, Chapman Bathurst

● Mike Simpson, technical and design director, Philips

Lighting

● Peter Le Manquais, group technical director, Wila Lighting

● Lee Gunner, executive lighting designer, Hoare Lea