At the start of 2012 I have been reflecting on what we did last year and have distilled a few highlights to share.

Community projects

2011 was by far our biggest year for community projects. In February we organised a fundraiser called Floodlight for victims if the QLD and VIC floods. We also got heavily involved with the Light in Winter festival at Fed Square, organising the Meaning of Light, Ready Steady Light and Fabulous Foyers and Facades. Then to cap it all off we orgaised another installment of LightCycle, a sustainable light fixture design competition as part of the State of Design Festival. These events we principally aimed at challenging people to think about light, perhaps in a different way and to continue the lighting conversation.

LightCycle 2011 opening party

Awards

We were very proud to collect a further 3 IESANZ design awards for Lonsdale Street, Victoria State Legislative Chamber and Westfield Sydney, bringing our practice’s tally to 14 gongs.

The lighting conversation

2011 saw us make a significant contribution to the online lighting conversation. We tweeted, we facebooked, we wrote blog posts, we asked and answered questions on LinkedIn. And we made some new friends in the process.

Our team

While it has been sad to bid farewell to some departing team members, in 2011 we were pleased to welcome some fabulous new faces to the team. We were joined by Jim Birch, Tina Atic and then Christopher Knowlton who all joined us for periods as a guest designer; all of whom made a significant contribution to our work and have provided new perspectives on our design thinking. We were also joined by Elisha Howard, our super practice manager.

Speaking engagements

Members of Electrolight’s team were invited to speak at a number of events in 2011. We gave papers at the Future of Light Summit in Melbourne as well as the PLDC conference in Madrid. In addition to that, our Dave Anderson co-organised the world’s first lighting Pecha Kucha which was incredibly well received.  Sharing ideas and hearing the ideas of others is a great source of inspiration for our practice.

We look forward to seeing what 2012 will bring.

The use of BIM (Building Information Modeling) software is growing, and in some design firms it is starting to replace CAD software for the purposes of architectural and building system design.  We have been trialing the Elum Tools plug-in for Revit.  Elum Tools is the lighting calculation and modeling tool that works within Revit, the 3D building documentation program from Autodesk.

Revit seems to be gaining some considerable traction in our industry with more and more projects being documented in this program. We have done a few projects now in Revit and while there is a bit of a steep learning curve initially, there are some good benefits. For example, coordination between services is much better – the clashes between services (the ductwork clashing with the depth of a light fixture, for example) happen in the screen not on the site. And the new Elum Tools plug-in allows us to calculate the lighting levels within the Revit program, rather than having to export from CAD to a 3rd party calculation program (we use AGI 32), analyse, tweak and then re-draw in CAD to document. Now we are able to draw, calculate, tweak, recalculate and when we’re happy with it the documentation is already there because we did it all in Revit. Not only that, we can automatically see W/m2, schedule of luminaire totals and even a cost summary for the scheme.

One challenge that lies ahead is that most manufacturers do not produce ‘blocks’ to represent their fixtures yet. The block would comprise a 3D CAD drawing of the fixture as well as photometric information. Well done to Concord Sylvania and Eagle Lighting for giving us disks with this info. We’d be interested to hear from others who have this information or at least an update on when/if we can expect it.

Our CAD guru Tomas gave us a demonstration of the program’s capability at our weekly meeting and we felt that we’d just seen a glimpse of the future.  And it was exciting.

Last friday evening was the presentation evening for the Victorian IES Lighting Design Awards.

And the winners were (drum roll)…..

There were 2 excellence awards: MONA gallery fitout in Hobart by Vision Design and Shed One at Princes Wharf, also in Hobart by Point of View.  Both projects add a significant new contribution to the city of Hobart and are deserved winners of the award, highlighting the difference that specialist lighting design can make to a project.

MONA

There were 3 Commendations: The Botanical Restaurant (by NDY), The Victorian State Parliament Legislative Chamber, both in Melbourne and Lonsdale Street in Dandenong (both by Electrolight).

The IES awards process is open to anyone who wishes to enter. This year 18 projects were submitted and the judges went to visit each installation in person and heard a presentation by the designer who duly responded to their questions. The judges are all volunteers and they give their time because they care about lighting and understand how important it is to have discourse about lighting design. As entrants, we are very grateful to them for their generosity of time and spirit in making this happen.

The awards evening itself was themed for the 1930s to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the IES and it was great to see how many people got into the spirit of the occasion by dressing up.

Movember comes early for Tomas at Electrolight

The PLDC is a biennial international convention for lighting design where speakers and attendees gather to discuss the latest in lighting design trends, technology and governance. This year’s event was held in Madrid from 19-22 October 2011.

The convention is organised by VIA Verlag, a German publishing house that  publish the Professional Lighting Design magazine in conjunction with the PLDA. There were 76 speakers from around the world presenting papers across the following four streams: lighting application research, professional practice issues, Lighting design case studies and exterior lighting solutions.  There was no over-arching theme linking the streams.

There were some interesting papers. Paul Marantz from the legendary New York lighting design firm Fisher Marantz Stone gave an interesting opening address where he proposes that the iPad may be the saviour of the incandescent lamp. Yes, they really are still talking about this issue stateside!

Paul Marantz

I enjoyed Prof Philip Gabriel’s paper discussing ethical issues in the profession. Is the traditional fee for design service model outdated? Is there a better way of providing value to our clients such as the turn-key approach to design and supply of equipment that is gaining traction in China and India? If so what are the implications for peak bodies such as the IALD and PLDA who’s professional membership predicates that professional designers must be independent of suppliers?

Kevan Shaw, as always, was thought provoking and interesting. Kevan asked if the only way to deliver sustainable outcomes for projects is through very tight regulatory control or is there a case for giving designers the latitude and flexibility required to deliver on energy efficiency?

Jim Benya proposed a strategy for achieving recognition for the lighting design profession and called for a uniting umbrella organisation that represents lighting design at the highest level. The manufacturers seem to have their house in order but we are still disparate and that leaves lighting design in a position of vulnerability.

I saw some other excellent papers. A favourite was Kristin Bredal from Zenisk Lysdesign, a Norwegian lighting designer who spends a couple of months a year without seeing the sun.  This seems to provide her with the inspiration to design some beautiful public realm lighting, at the same time respecting the darkness and conserving power.

Kristin Bredal

We contributed to the conference by presenting two original papers. Rachel Burke gave an inspirational paper called ‘A healthy Light’ in which she explored contemporary thinking and research in the field of innovative design in the healthcare sector. She suggests a way of addressing the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of lighting design in healthcare settings.  And I gave a paper on professional practice issues aimed at those practitioners who are interested in setting up in private practice.

The feedback that I heard the most was that the conference was somewhat mixed; some exceptional papers interspersed with others that could have been much better. Moreover, the venue and general planning of the event were less than ideal. There was little or no gap between sessions which were held of 4 floors without a decent lift. This meant traipsing up and down stairs all day without a moment to sip a glass of water (if you could find some, that is).

Having said that, a conference that is all about lighting design is a great idea and it was good to be part of it. I met some interesting new people, learned some things I didn’t know and got to check out the fabulous city which is Madrid. And for that I’m very grateful. For more on the conference check out our facebook page.

Next week a contingent of three of our team from Electrolight will leave these shores to participate in the Professional Lighting Design Conference in Madrid.

PLDC is a biennial three-day conference built around four tracks offering around 65 papers from internationally renowned speakers and upcoming young professionals.  It is an honour to be invited to speak at such a prestigious event, a chance to share ideas, research and learnings with fellow professionals from around the world.  I attended the previous PLDC in Berlin and it was really fabulous.

From our studio, Rachel Burke will present a paper entitled ‘A Healthy Light’ an exploration of contemporary thinking and research in the field of innovative design and health with an emphasis on lighting design.

I will be giving a paper discussing the ins and outs of establishing a successful lighting design practice.

And just for good measure, our superstar international guest designer Christopher Knowlton has made a self-running poster about the use of interactive lighting controls within the office environment, evaluating user satisfaction & energy consumption.

Photo: Christopher Knowlton

Never has the humble roll of sticky tape looked more spectacular and elegant than at the installation of Tape Melbourne which opened to the public this week.

Open until 24^th September this giant structure created entirely from sticky tape (30kms to tape to be exact) spans the West Terrace of Fed Square in what looks like a cross between spiders web and a tendon-like organic form.  Visually intriguing from the outside, the creators Numen/For Use invite visitors to remove their shoes and ascend a small step ladder into the structure for a crawl through a foreign world.

The form and scale of the object are truly impressive.  Lit with a few simple parcans the layers of tape reveal their complex composition to create some fascinating patterns giving the whole form a unique texture.

As public art, this piece really seems to engage.  Business men in suits to the hipster uni crowd were keen to get inside and experience the piece up close and personal…..and isn’t that the point of public art?  Well worth a visit, I loved it!

We are delighted to welcome Christopher Knowlton to our studio.  Chris has relocated to Melbourne from London and will be with us for a period of 6 months.

To say that Chris is a lighting enthusiast is an understatement. He has been involved with creative arts since age 12 (yes, they start them young in the UK) and has developed his design repertoire through dance, theatre and now architectural lighting. Chris has completed a masters degree in Light and Lighting at the presigious Bartlet School of Architecture in London and was named Young Lighter of the Year in 2011.  We are very pleased to have Chris here in the studio and look forward to rich collaboration over these coming months.

Christopher Knowlton