In this article for LD+A, Michael C. Skurla takes a hard look at lighting’s potential as a player in the Internet of Things.
The article begins:
Leaving Light + Building this year, two things were clear to me. First, smart is a prefix the lighting industry has embraced. Second, marketing teams have embraced the liberal use of the acronym “IoT” in everything from light fixtures to plastic polymers and even paint. We have been bombarded with lectures, educational articles, as well as massive marketing masterpieces for years now on lighting’s transition to a new age. Until very recently lighting companies had accompanied this “IoT” and “smart” prefix with promises of solving issues we hadn’t dreamed up yet; or offering better solutions to problems employing a lighting twist (room reservations, personal control solutions and even temperature control, to name a few). These “smart” extras were woven with grand marketing stories of future promises of the ecosystems they accompanied. Through all of this, however, luminescence remained our core focus and competency as an industry, and that of our customers.
He goes on to define and value synergy in the systems that drive buildings, talk about how sensory networks drive data that produces this synergy, describe lighting’s geographic positioning as the delivery platform for these sensors, and cover concurrent technologies such as the Cloud.
The challenge for the lighting industry, Skurla notes, is whether lighting professionals can stretch outside their comfort zones to deliver solutions providing synergistic benefits across building systems. He writes:
As an industry, we must adapt to this changing skill set which includes significantly more understanding of not only other technology and trades within a building but more importantly increasing our exposure outside of the comfort zone of construction circles of influence. Lighting can get a larger piece of the building pie, but it’s only through lighting professionals expanding their network, expertise, and trust within different stakeholders using the building, that this can be achieved.
Click here to read this interesting take.
