Education + Resources

  “Shadow” is best understood as a lighting-design methodology that intentionally uses shadow as a design material, not as a flaw to eliminate. In practice, it means shaping light so shadows help define form, depth, texture, atmosphere, and emotional tone rather than simply filling everything with uniform brightness. Traditional lighting often tries to reduce shadows. Shadow-based [...]

  Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) is an engineering methodology that optimizes product design to minimize production costs and streamline assembly. By prioritizing how parts are made and put together early in the design phase, companies reduce part counts, accelerate time-to-market, and eliminate expensive downstream modifications. The methodology is divided into two complementary core disciplines: Design [...]

  Sustainability in lighting requires more than just LED light sources. It requires that luminaires be durable, repairable, and upgradable. Zhaga standards have been developed to standardize interface specifications for components of serviceable luminaires. Zhaga calls this framework “Circularity Lighting.” While quality luminaires are designed for lifetimes of 50,000 to 100,000 hours, many connectivity platforms [...]

  Earlier this year, the U.S. General Service Administration (GSA) published LED Lighting and Controls Guidance for Federal Buildings. The guide was authored by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The document provides guidance for Federal agencies to select the most cost-effective and energy-efficient lighting systems available. It [...]

  The other day, I heard a repeat of an old Planet Money radio show episode on NPR about the history of light. Rather than just focus on the changes in technology over thousands of years, it really focused on the economic history of light. The story interviews a Yale economics professor who studied how [...]

  Having created many hundreds of lighting product spec sheets, here are my suggested tips for improving their clarity, design, and completeness: UNDERSTAND THE PURPOSE Always remember that the spec sheet has two purposes. The first is as a document to help sell the product, by highlighting up-front the key features, benefits, differentiation, and overall [...]

  After 7 years of publishing the lightED website, NAED’s tED magazine will stop publishing lightED and start publishing a new website, electrifiED, focused on electrification and the associated supply chain. All past lightED articles and future articles about lighting will be relocated to tedmag.com. Starting Monday, July 1, electrifiED will be published at www.tedelectrified.com [...]

      The Design Lights Consortium (DLC) has published a new Lighting Controls Best Practices document that explains five basic networked lighting control (NLC) strategies: dimming, high-end trim, occupancy/vacancy sensing, scheduling, and daylight harvesting and gives an overview of how to implement them to maximize energy savings. The guide is written to describe each [...]

By The LIA & 42 Partners ltd A lot of photometric data in the form of LDT and IES files pass across our desks, the majority of them are problematic. Lighting designers use advanced tools like Relux and Dialux to produce incredibly detailed lighting designs with near photorealistic renderings of the lighting effects. They use [...]