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on price needs to become a thing of the past. Tat is the real challenge.
Smart technology sits here too. Not just the controls to reduce energy, but those that monitor and predict, that report when a component might fail, or if it already has. Tere is a whole new avenue for controls companies to explore. Playing a part in that preventative or predictive maintenance will be artificial intelligence. While my experience of AI suggests it is currently overrated, it is setting us on a path where learning from system behaviour will help predict the lifespan of products. AI could also optimise energy usage by learning patterns of light usage and adjusting lighting levels accordingly, reducing energy consumption and extending the lifespan of lighting fixtures. On other fronts AI will replace repetitive tasks. I already use software to place luminaires in a room and to see the results. Te design rules I apply to get there are not difficult. AI is perfectly placed to solve complex problems like this, using iterative techniques to select the ideal luminaire specification.
But AI might also enhance the aesthetic appeal of spaces. By analysing factors such as room size, colour scheme and furniture placement, it could suggest optimal lighting designs that enhance the visual appeal of a space. However, if AI learns only to design a scheme with just flat panel luminaires, I am going to be really underwhelmed… In case you think lighting design is not on the radar for AI, search out a project by Vinci Energies, SDEL and Santerne. Together they are developing a tool called LAIghting, a generative design-driven solution that leverages data science methods to automate and optimise lighting layout design generation using particle swarm optimisation.
Certainly, I expect AI to minimise the time spent on repetitive and iterative design. We can see the start in design tools such as DIALux, which takes many hundreds of luminaires all at once and iterates to the most appropriate road lighting solution, for instance. Variables such as column height, elevation angles, pavement position, spacing envelope and so on allows the software to calculate and evaluate tens of thousands of variations in just a few seconds.
Below left Could AR be used for glasses that would augment lighting in a space, allowing users to tailor it to their personal preferences or the specific needs of an event or activity?
Below right Ofice lighting designed using AI
‘AI might enhance the aesthetic appeal of spaces. By analysing factors such as room size, colour scheme and furniture
placement, it could suggest optimal lighting designs that enhance the visual appeal of a space’
AI leads us nicely to my next prediction. It could be used to improve the health and wellbeing of occupants. Lighting can impact mood, productivity and circadian rhythms. AI could help us to adjust lighting based on time of day, weather and individual preferences to promote wellbeing. Lighting for wellbeing has also been a buzz phrase for years. It is a great marketing story used to sell what is simply a variation in colour temperature and intensity through the day. But it could be so much more than that. Most of our interior spaces have static lighting. Yet we as a species, evolving under the mercurial nature of daylight, are adapted to deal with dynamic light. AI could help here, learning through feedback what works, what impacts absenteeism, what impacts team performance. If it all sounds Orwellian, it does not have to be. Tis is a project yet to be shaped. Designers, however, need to be aware that they carry a legal duty of care to those using lighting systems. As we discover more about the impact of spectrum, intensity and duration of light on human health, that same light has health impacts, potentially long-term, if we get it wrong. We are only just discovering the first effects of light on our bodies. We already know of some of the more obvious negative impacts: UV and skin cancer, blue light and retinal damage, to pick on just two. Te long-term repercussions of artificial light are not well understood.
Tere is therefore still so much work and research to do here. Te effect of lighting on seasonal affective disorder; the impact of colour and flicker on autism; infrared light and its effect on healing; light source size, spacing, colour and intensity and its impact on glare. Design for health is a growing challenge for designers. Perhaps designers will need some form of medical training in chronobiology or phototherapy, who knows?
Could there be different way? What if we did not light the space so much as the person. In fact, not really the person but their eye. What if, rather than placing light within architecture, we used sensors to map spaces and augmented reality to paint light on to surfaces in a way that each user experiences it individually.
Augmented reality could come to lighting too. In a DMI (drunken marketing initiative) some years back a colleague asked me what would change lighting for ever. I pointed to
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