Series 2 Episode 2: Light Pt2

Having recently looked at how natural light can be considered as a design element, this episode moves on to investigate the almost endless possibilities of artificial light to make our lives better.

Transcript

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It is pretty difficult for us nowadays to imagine a time when the only artificial light was candles or lamps, which crudely piggybacked on the light from fire flames. No smoke without fire, but for a long time we had no light without fire. So people started to think, how can we carry around a bit of that while maximizing the light and minimizing the heat? So we got burning wicks and flaming torches. Eventually, gaslighting was a bit of an improvement, but not that much really. What we'd been waiting for was of course, electricity. Welcome to another episode of Make Life Better by Design with me, Kevin Drayton. I've talked in an earlier episode about natural light and how we can take a, a design led or design aware approach to it. But when it comes to artificial lighting we're entering a whole new universe. There's just been so much innovation in recent decades, recent years. I mean, so much so that by the time you are listening to this, there may well be new technologies, which I haven't even mentioned today. The, the technology of artificial light is generally not of that much interest to us. What really matters is the effects it can be used to achieve, and certainly the domestic journey from a single central drop, flex, and lamp holder-which, by the way, tended to be distinguished primarily by either the wattage of the bulb or if not that, then whatever sort of fairy tale shade it was dressed in. From that, we moved to today's typical multiple source lighting with LED light-sorry, that's LED is light emitting diode-LED lights of various kinds allied to dimmers, sensors, time controls. That move from the single lamp to that sort of multi array has been bewilderingly fast. Nothing you don't know. No, that's fair enough. So how can we make the best use of these technological advances,? I mean, I can't think of another area of design where the balance between what we can do and what will genuinely make life better, is so sort of wobbly. My mantra, as I'm sure you know by now, is always'Only Connect'. You connect the technical possibilities with our human responses to lighting and we can enhance our lives in a way very hard to do with anything else. To illustrate this business of changing technology, rapid development, I'll give you just a few memories from my own history. I can remember as a child, small child, sitting in the kitchen of a friend of my parents at a time when fluorescent light-tube lighting-was very new. And I can remember the feeling I had. It was like sitting in a sort of blue haze and there was this insistent buzzing that gave you a headache in quarter of an hour. Second one: years have moved on. Now I was attending a lecture which aimed to teach me how many of a particular ceiling light fitting and at what spacing there should be placed to achieve that uniform light level right the way across an open plan office, and to do the same for the office next to that and for the office next to that, and all the offices on every floor of the building. Third one: I was walking around a lighting trade exhibition, and I was very attracted to what I thought was an extremely elegant, very simple, quite tiny floor lamp that was giving off a fantastic light. So I go up to it and I start to examine the head of this thing and then realize that my fingers are burning. This fitting had one of these tiny little newfangled at the time capsule bulbs. Tiny and newfangled perhaps, but blisteringly hot metal all around it very definitely. Health and safety had not caught up with that one at the time. I also remember working on my first floodlit all weather sports pitch. Sort of thing that I'm sure many of us, or at least your children and grandchildren perhaps, spend quite a bit of time on. And I was trying to work out from the lighting distribution diagrams that the suppliers of the light fittings had supplied, if those light levels met the requirements of the ruling bodies of the various different sports that we expected to host. And if you know anything at all about sport or anything indeed about sports lighting, you'll know that different sports played at different levels of ability are required to have certain levels of artificial light to be acceptable. I think the thing that is so important, particularly with reference to the all over light in offices, is that the importance of the subjective response of human beings to lighting schemes is actually accepted. It not only means that the calculations that are involved in creating these sort of battery hen office conditions no longer have absolute rule, but also it means that your preferred lighting scheme is your business. And you can't rate it against some sort of universal diktat. Where individuals can exercise choice and control in their preferred lighting, it usually involves balancing out amenity, cost and comfort. Well, the amenity bit is simple. Does the lighting let you do what you want to do safely and comfortably? Typically, that involves some sort of general lighting for everyday activities coupled with reading lamps, task lamps, or some other sort of directional adjustable light source. I am made very aware of this aspect whenever I visit the dentist. The surgery is lit with perfectly nice ceiling fittings that provide good light for general activities minor dentistry tasks and admin and so on. But when the time comes for me to lean back in the chair and open my mouth then that big gun is swung into position so the dental dog can see the rabbit cake hole in all its decrepit glory. And a good thing too. Cost, the second one, that's also very simple. Lighting uses energy a not inconsiderable component of most budgets, which is why we've developed these proliferation of signs saying,'turn off the lights when you leave'. Things like the passive infrared, sensor PIR you'll see. Time switches and daylight sensors all help to minimize unnecessary use of electricity. Of course you have to pay for that technology in the first place. But the kind of lighting that you like or, or need means you've gotta reconcile yourself to the cost of it. You might regard the government's insistence on the phasing out of old tungsten light bulbs in favor of LEDs as a bit uncomfortably nanny state, but it should make us think about just how much energy we must have wasted for so long. The third leg of the stool is comfort. A quiet evening of firelight and candles may be relatively inexpensive. There'll come a time when the recessed LEDs need to be switched on so you can make that cafetiere of coffee. Oh, and a comfortable wet shave should not be attempted with poor, inadequate lighting. On the subject of cost, the actual light fittings themselves can soak up a fair bit of income. Now, as a design geek myself, I am not surprisingly drawn to certain classic light fittings. The Tizio Lamp by Richard Sapper and the Tolomeo range from the Italian company Artemide. Now, again, this is not video. I cannot simply show you a picture of these fittings, but do look them up if you have any sort of interest. Tizio is T-I-Z-I-O and Tolomeo: T-O-L-O-M-E-O. Why am I drawn to them? Well, lamps such as these are exquisite pieces of engineering, beautifully functional, aesthetically pleasing, and I can't deny it, bloody expensive. And when you consider that, really it's the light the illumination that they're providing, that's the really important bit, not what it is that's actually throwing that light out. Well, why spend money on a better fitting? The simple answer is that because for me, the design does make my life better. We've touched on it briefly already, but the control of artificial lighting also plays a big part in how it affects us. Dimmers are a very simple way to manage light, to get, more out of an individual fitting. Adding a dimmer to a light scene, transform the possibilities with a very simple addition. And I suppose from that standpoint, theater lighting has had a big influence on domestic lighting schemes recently. Theater and cinema lights, for example. And take great pains to achieve very smooth transition curves from dark to light and back down again. I've had involvement in theater and cinema schemes where I learned a lot about the types of fittings that were acceptable to the management and the ones that weren't. You could not drop the lights in a cinema or theater and have a jerky transition. It had to be nice and clean and smooth. So the, the capacity that you have in a theater to set multiple light source scenes, which are pre-programmed and choreographed to change with the script of the piece, has actually now moved from the theater to the home. The internet allows control of every electrical fitment in your home. To be done so from your mobile phone, if you wish. I've been involved in projects where every light, every roller blind, all curtains, security, heating, ventilation could be controlled from either a mobile phone or intricate switch pads dotted around the home. Entire sequences of how these things operate can be changed at the touch of a button. I have no doubt since I was last involved in that type of project, the proud homeowner can probably now do it all by voice control. Yeah. Complicated. Mm, not cheap. Three of my favorite sayings, therefore come to mind at this point. One: being able to do something is not on its own sufficient reason for doing it. This is my rule, nobody else's. Two: the more there is in a system to go wrong, the more likely it is to go wrong. And thirdly: ah, keep it simple, stupid. As with every other area of design, artificial lighting has numerous ways in which it can make our lives better. Find out as much as you can about it or as much as you want to find out. Then make some choices and take some decisions, which as we know is the essence of design anyway. You certainly don't have to spend a fortune to achieve lighting that makes you feel good and helps, rather than hinders whatever tasks you are performing. Lamps or bulbs, as we used to say, quite complex things nowadays, even for ostensibly ordinary light fittings. Knowing the strength, the wattage of a lamp is rarely sufficient nowadays. Some lamps can be dimmed, some lamps can't. Some have bayonet caps, some have screw caps. Some have standard screw caps, some have small screw caps. In some cases, you will be offered lamps with different color temperatures. That's the thing that determines whether a lamp is warm or cool. At its simplest, I would say don't mix color temperatures in schemes unless you really understand the implications and you know what you are wanting to achieve with it. I have a desk lamp that takes a car bulb. We have an oven, which requires Indiana Jones to seek out a replacement lamp. We've got strings of outdoor lights where bulbs cannot be replaced. Now they tell us, and solar powered lights who develop a mind of their own after a few months. Most recently, well for me anyway, it's the advances of battery technology that's taken light fittings away from the old constraint of cables and power outlets. So if you have a dining table in the middle of a room, and you'd like a sexy lamp set between the glasses to create the right sort of atmosphere for an intimate dinner, then a rechargeable table lamp does the job without anybody having to run the risk of tripping over a cable whilst carrying a dish of roast potatoes. And in fact, you can even carry that same table light fitting outside onto the terrace to finish off your coffees there at the end of the meal. Let's think of another one: that tiresome cupboard, where your own shadow always obscures the contents when you open the doors and, and peer in. Nowadays pop up a, a self adhesive LED strip and the jobs a goodun. So the whole business of artificial lighting is certainly not easy peasy, but it's worth a bit of effort for the benefits it can bring you, whether that is in terms of spend, pure pleasure or making life safer for you. So I would say at the end of all this, go forth and light your life better by design. Thanks again very much for listening, and until next time, it's bye for now.