Guest Authors

  By Yang Lan, International Market Manager, Star Factory Lantern A daytime attraction is read through movement, surface detail and close-range interaction. After dark, silhouette, brightness, color relationships, viewing distance and control strategy take over. Planning both modes together can make outdoor attractions more coherent, serviceable and flexible. At Night, the Design Priority Changes Outdoor [...]

Figure 1. Feasibility boundaries for achieving 250 m-EDI.   By Bill Chan, President, LiteController Inc. Shortly after my recent IES FIRES article, “Circadian Lighting in Offices: Feasibility Boundaries and Design Trade-Offs” was published, an architectural lighting designer left a comment on LinkedIn: “Nowadays, it’s getting [to be] a real Mission Impossible!” That brief comment perfectly [...]

  By Gary Satanovsky, Product Design and Marketing Manager, NuWatt Lighting Since the earliest days of electric light, illumination has played a central role in keeping people and property safe after dark. Along the way, security lighting became governed by a simple, seemingly intuitive principle: brighter spaces are safer spaces. And while that assumption – higher [...]

    By Szymon Slupik, President & CTO, Silvair Energy saving is the primary feature of lighting control systems. The concept is well known: dim the lights if there is enough sunlight (daylight harvesting controls) or turn the lights off when there are no people in the room (occupancy / vacancy – based controls). The [...]

By Eric Bretschneider, Ph.D Excerpts from a larger technical report, linked below. Executive Summary This report details a photobiological hazard assessment of the general concept of Orbital Solar Reflectors (OSRs). A recent proposal, Reflect Orbital’s proposed Earendil-1 satellite is used as an exemplar. The analysis was conducted following IEC 62471:2006 Photobiological Safety of Lamps and [...]

  By Brian Liebel & Rick Utting, DarkSky International, Tucson, AZ. Executive Summary Upward-emitted outdoor light has long been identified as a source of atmospheric light pollution, a.k.a. sky glow. This form of light pollution is an obvious contributor to the brightening of the nighttime sky and can be observed as glowing domes of light [...]

  By Mariel Acevedo, MIES – ALR & Amanda Schaneman, MIES – ETC Trauma informed design (TID) is a newer form of practice in the architectural community.  It’s been around since 2013 and is gaining traction in all kinds of building types.  As the work becomes more prominent, the lighting community should understand the language [...]

  By Heesu Chung, Brand Lead, Warm by Design The consumer backlash against the “big light” is easy to dismiss as social-media shorthand, but the underlying issue is familiar to anyone in lighting: a single high source is being asked to handle every job in the room. For years, the residential lighting conversation was dominated [...]

  By C. Webster Marsh, Lighting Controls Designer, Sladen Feinstein Integrated Lighting Changing White Lighting: What is the End-User’s Experience? I have learned that one of the fastest ways to lose someone outside the lighting industry is to ask, ‘Do you want 2700K or 3500K?’ It is a perfectly normal question for us inside the [...]