Could it be you?

You will be based in our Melbourne studio working on some of our fabulous projects which range from hospitality and gaming through to retail, high-end residential and university projects. Oh, and a hospital as well.

This position will not be advertised conventionally – we are looking for someone who follows us through our blog and social media channels and hence is in tune with who we are and what we’re all about. For background reading see our facebook and twitter pages.

Who should apply? Firstly, you should be a lighting enthusiast. The sort of person who never stops looking at, thinking about and messing around with light. The sort of person who talks about lighting at parties. You’ll need to be friendly, open-minded, collaborative, flexible, creative and not take life too seriously.  You should also be a proficient, independent user of AutoCAD, Photoshop, Indesign and one of the lighting analysis programs (we use AGI 32). Having good sketching and 3D CAD (we use revit) skills would be good. You’ll probably have about 5 year’s experience in lighting design.

While there is room for flexibility from our end, we would envisage a period of employment initially for 6 months, based in our Melbourne studio. For international candidates we will assess the visa situation but would not foresee any issues (we have had 2 x guest designers from the UK previously). Ideally, we would like to appoint the successful candidate as soon as possible.

Does this sound like the job for you? If so please email our practice manager Elisha Howard elisha (at) electrolight.com.au with a cover letter telling us all about yourself and a CV and folio.

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.

This is what he said…  

So far lighting legislation has been all about energy use. It has also been written not from the perspective of how to actually reduce the energy actually used by lighting schemes but from the perspective of limiting things that are easy to measure and quantify. The result of this approach is extremely challenging when you are trying to design from the perspective of the users needs, to deliver quality of light rather than quantity.

What we have now is legislation that aims to make only  “efficient” light sources and equipment available. This has resulted in the ban on incandescent lamps and the removal from the market, in Europe at least, of older fluorescent lamp technology, particularly T12 lamps and magnetic control gear. Is this effective? If you are looking at energy use holistically then definitely not.  The mantra associated with this approach :

“If you increase the efficiency of a lamp you will create a consequent, demonstrable, equivalent saving in energy in use  for every application”

From Light’s Labour’s Lost has often proven to be fatuous. How many times has a higher wattage ”efficient” lamp been needed to replace a lower wattage “inefficient” lamp because a suitable substitute was not available or because some aspects of the “efficient” technology have fallen short of the lighting requirements such as instant start up or dimmability? How about electronic control gear in extremely hot or cold environments; does this work? No! How about the cost and waste associated with having to replace an entire lighting system because some types of lamps are no longer available?

The other strand is limitations on lighting power density. Does this do any better? Not really. It places limitations on design for flexibility. It is often desirable to have distinctly different schemes for lighting at different times of day. Not just different lighting levels but different colour temperatures, different surfaces being lit, different patterns of light, you name it we all want to do it sometimes. A total limitation on power density very effectively prevents overlaid schemes with different fittings serving different purposes that are required at different times.

What are the factors that determine lighting energy use? Admittedly reasonable efficiency of equipment is one thing however the biggest factor is time, after all a light that is switched off is consuming no power.  Is there a measure that could be used to factor time into energy use? Astonishingly there has been since 2007, enshrined in EN15193, and is called the Lighting Energy Numeric Indicator (LENI). Why is it not the basis forlighting legislation? Well hopefully it will become the basis for UK building regulations  from 2013 however it is being heavily resisted by some interests who do not see it as a route to selling the latest (and most expensive!) lighting equipment and those who will actually have to consider lighting design in respect of how spaces are used rather than just a jumble of numbers in a spreadsheet.

LENI may be the first tentative step towards measuring energy that is actually used in lighting, however we probably have a bigger mountain to climb. We really need to measure the light  that actually reaches our eyes rather than comes out of light fittings and lands on notional horizontal planes, however that is another discussion!

Kevan Shaw has over 30 years experience in lighting design and is the director of Kevan Shaw Lighting Design based in Edinburgh. (http://www.kevan-shaw.com/)

Kevan Shaw

So what does inspire us? And moreover, how do we communicate this for the world to see? When presented with great challenges such as this we did what we always do – made some tea and talked about it. At some length! We agreed that collaboration is the most important aspect of our approach to work and central to our inspiration. But how to communicate this?

We also wanted our response to be representative of where we’re from – Mondo Arc is an international publication after all and we are very proud Melbournians!

We eventually arrived at the old saying “many hands make light work” and knew that this was it; we had it. Next thing was to figure out how to express this. Someone said “with light, of course”. Next thing we had the gobo catalogue out, found a theatre projector, identified a location (just HAD  to be Melbourne’s world famous Hosier Lane), teed up one of Melbourne’s best photographers Matt Irwin, designed and had fabricated a neon sign, hired a generator and headed to site one evening, praying we wouldn’t fall foul of the weather or City of Melbourne by-laws inspectors (we had enough to organise without getting a permit to shoot as well!).

We were really pleased with the result – hope you like it too.  See the digital edition and go to page 178 to see it for yourself.

Many hands make light work

Setting up

Trials and tweaks

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.

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

Why the fuss? Check out this spectacularly beautiful movie of the northern lights, recorded over 6 months by Ole C. Salomonsen. And if you like that, be sure to check out his Flickr site too.

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.

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.

What’s wrong with that then?

The problem is that the only people who win are the contractors. Yep, the spec-busters.  Let’s use an example to illustrate why: take a light fixture that has been specified with a value of $100. Let’s say it’s a downlight, for argument’s sake. You can get downlights for $50 or you could spend $200 but the designer has chosen the $100 downlight because that is the one that fits with the project budget which was advised by the client/QS AND that’s the one that the calculations are based on.

All things being equal, the $200 downlight will perform best, the $50 downlight the worst.  The $100 downlight was  chosen and then the design was optimised to make the most efficient use of the product and hence using the minimum number to achieve the required lighting levels. Moreover, the $100 downlight has been properly assessed, we’ve seen a sample, checked the build quality, warranty, quality of control gear and lamp, ease of installation and maintenance. It’s probably from a manufacturer we trust and have used previously. It probably is backed by technical support staff who will be able to provide after-sales service. In short, there was a lot of thought that went into the specification of this product.

Next thing the specification is issued to the contractor for quoting. Here’s what happens: contractor wants to make his quote as competitive as possible and offers the client potential savings on the lighting equipment. He sees a downlight and thinks “a downlight’s a downlight; why do we need to spend $100 when we can spend $50. Or $30″?  Contractor looks good in the eyes of the client (who’s probably wondering why their consultant was wasting their money on expensive fittings in the first place).  But the contractor isn’t passing on the savings to the client. They’ll substitute for the $30 fitting and offer it to the client for $60. The client thinks he’s saving $40 per fitting (and there might be lots of them and hence a lot of money).

But guess what? You get what you pay for.  The client gets a way inferior product that won’t perform nearly as well as that specified. I have never experienced a contractor finding a better value for money fixture than the one we specified. Like ever. Stands to reason doesn’t it? We’re professional lighting consultants, that’s what we do for a living every day. The contractor isn’t.

Who would you trust to choose the lights?