How to tackle scourge of ‘spec busting’

Mary Rushton-Beales of Lighting Design House will tackle the perennial problem of ‘protecting the specification’ as one of featured speakers at an online conference in April 2015.

Known as ‘spec busting’, the widespread practice by contractors of substituting poorer-performing fittings and sources for those carefully researched and chosen by the designer, undermines lighting schemes and short-changes clients.

Mary will be tackle the subject at the Online Lighting Solutions Conference hosted by Lighting and Interiors Online. The conference will look at all aspects of lighting specification and procurement facing the lighting industry. All the conference materials will be available at any time for six months for £9.99 paid to the organisers.

For details click Lighting Solutions Conference.

Design insights

Ten tips for lighting landscapes

From parks to gardens, the principles are the same, Mary Rushton-Beales reveals.

Use natural shapes

All the rules of exterior architectural lighting apply but with the additional need to exploit or enhance natural shapes and contours, especially through the use of shadows. As ever, the watchword is subtlety.

Make use of walls

Vertical surfaces are the lighting designer’s and the landscape architect’s friend. Grazing or washing hard and soft surfaces can be both effective and gentle ways to create ambient light.

Use colour temperature carefully

Colour temperature helps set the atmosphere but that does not necessarily mean that you have to use warm light in gardens and parks. Diffuse, cold light coming through trees and bushes like moonlight may feel more natural and comfortable than warm light that evokes subconscious images of embers and flames.

Use light as a guide

Lighting has a particularly important role in way-finding in outdoor spaces. Techniques such as silhouetting and spotlighting can be used to orientate as well as to draw the eye to features such as planting or sculptures.

Match plants and lighting

It is essential to coordinate planting and lighting. If the contrast in lighting levels between a pathway and its borders is too great, the effect can be threatening, Dispersed lighting can be very effective on shrubbery. Edge lighting and other forms of low level lighting such as bollards have a role to play here.

Think day and night

At night the use of open spaces may change, and with it the viewpoint that the lighting has to serve. For example a garden that is well used in the day but empty at night may still be overlooked, in which case low-level lighting may be very effective, particularly where there is water.

Reflect on water

Water, of course provides endless opportunities for lighting, with movement and reflections.

Design for distance

One key difference between landscape lighting and most architectural lighting is the distance over which lighting effects can be seen. Schemes on green field sites are often viewed from long distances and even miniscule lumen outputs no greater than a candle’s create impact.

Don’t pollute with light

Up-lighting can be problematic in terms of light spill and light pollution, which clearly have to be controlled carefully. Light spill into neighbouring areas is not only bad design but also illegal.

Design in context

All exterior lighting design needs to be balanced with the back ground light of the existing environment.

Media: Retail Focus

Retail needs a mix of sources

Retail Focus recently looked at the role of natural light in shops and shopping centres

Retail Focus recently looked into the complex issue of integrating natural and artificial lighting. Daylight is continually changing in intensity and direction. Because it is full spectrum light it shows objects and materials in their true colours by because light is a form of energy it also has photochemical effect and causes some material s to fade or degrade. Lighting designers use tools including software to model its behaviour, mitigate its effects and choose the right artificial sources for day and night.

‘Daylighting is excellent where you have food courts and shopping centres,’Lighting Design House principal May Rushton-Beales told the magazine. ‘But for retail space to be successful you need to highlight products. I think you can save more energy and gain more benefits in a retail scheme or shop with a really, really carefully considered artificial lighting scheme than with a daylight scheme alone.’

Full article

Media: Lighting

Magazine spotlights lighting design process

Landscape architect Rummey Design and Lighting Design House featured in a recent Lighting magazine feature focusing on the benefits of collaboration

Lighting magazine recently featured Lighting Design House’s Mary Rushton-Beales and landscape architect Rummey Design executive director Elizabeth Staveley in the first of a series of articles providing an insight into the collaborative design process.

‘Particularly on big projects, we work with lighting specialists, geologists, archaeologists – all sorts of different experts. Lighting is something that is very difficult to envisage and communicate. It’s difficult to brief so we talk about the concept and pass that on to experts who come back with a response that picks on up on a philosophy of the design,’ Elizabeth told the magazine.

Lighting Design House frequently works as part of a design team on projects whose scale and complexity demand a multi-disciplinary approach. ‘Lighting play such an important role in the way we perceive and use spaces within buildings, towns and in the open that lighting designers need to be part of the conversation from the earliest possible stage,’ says Mary. ‘‘If “location, location, location” is the estate agent’s mantra, ‘in landscape design it’s “coordination, coordination, coordination”.’

Lighting and health

Why we need responsive lighting controls

Mary Rushton-Beales looks at combining technologies to create ‘caring’ lighting.

Dr Meher Engineer and I recently co-presented two CIBSE CPD events demonstrating the effects of light and colour on our minds and bodies. We were using a device called the Monocrom Light Dome, which creates the illusion of infinite space filled with a uniform field of monochrome light, from any chosen point on the visible spectrum.

We had to be very careful to emphasise that any form of colour or light therapy is a complementary treatment and that anyone with a medical problem should see his or her doctor. However, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of the link between light and health and there is a lot of research going on into the medical use of specific wavelengths of light. They include recent studies that indicate that light levels and anxiety are linked.

Research links light to obesity

Research published recently by the charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer even suggests that women whose bedrooms are overlit at night are more likely to be overweight and may even be more prone to cancer. ‘Metabolism is affected by cyclical rhythms within the body that relate to sleeping, waking and light exposure,’ according to the report’s co-author professor Anthony Swerdlow of the Institute of Cancer Research.
Charities such as Medical Detection Dogs and Support Dogs train pets that can detect metabolic changes using smell to indentify cancer in medical samples or alert diabetics when their blood sugar is getting low. In an odd change of fortune, rats have been trained as laboratory assistants capable of sniffing out TB.

Electronic ‘nose’ could link to lighting controls

Not everyone would want to spend all day with an animal at their side like Lyra in His Dark Materials, but fortunately so-called electronic noses are under development that will eventually be small enough to install in our homes and workplaces. We might even be able to wear them.
They are also likely to become more sophisticated, better at detecting small changes and – importantly – they are almost certainly going to be integrated with other systems, including lighting.

Intelligent lighting or ‘caring’ lighting?

Lighting controls are becoming more intelligent, they are being linked to technologies such as BEMs and systems used in areas such as retail to ‘personalise’ shopping through Lifi linked to mobiles, GPS, ‘big data’ and so on.
Thinking about these parallel developments, it occurred to me that if we were to combine systems that sensed our mood or state of health with responsive lighting controls we could have not just ‘smart’ controls but ‘caring’ controls – even though this would use technology that is largely designed to exploit us.

So, if you were to arrive home anxious, coming down with a bug or simply hot and tired, the lighting and environmental controls could recognise you, let you in and change the lighting appropriately – by raising the blue content, for example. The lighting in offices and other workplaces might also be geared not just to maximising productivity but also to the physical and psychological wellbeing of staff – monitoring and responding in real time.

Health basic to lighting design

As a matter of course, all good lighting designers create schemes for visual comfort, to light efficiently and effectively, to come within budget, to waste as little energy and do as little damage to the environment as possible. For want of a better term, this is the lighting designer’s creed. At Lighting Design House we also consider wellbeing to be a top priority whether in the workplace, the home or the hospital.