By Clifton Stanley Lemon
We humans are both cursed and blessed with an obsession with the future. It’s constantly amazing to me how much we crave narratives that predict the future and proceed to stick to them even in the face of direct and persistent evidence of their utter failure to predict. We’re existentially limited to crafting predictions based on past events, which is useful until it isn’t, when black swan events catch us off guard and blow up our world. We really don’t like it when this happens, so we’ve created a fantasy narrative called “future proofing.” The first time I ever heard that term I thought: seriously? We can’t even “present proof.”
In the lighting industry we fail by expecting the future to be driven by technology innovation alone. As I declared in Part 1, in this regard we suffer from a widespread lack of imagination. I find it useful to study the past for patterns. The past may not repeat itself in predictable ways, but what we need is anything that gives us even an incremental advantage, as making bets on rapidly evolving technology seems to be increasingly risky. Used correctly, history provides this in abundance.
Here I examine some of the problems that are most worth solving with innovation, and I make a case for focusing on practical, human problems as a path forward rather than relying on untested assumptions about future technology trajectories.
First Principles and Problems Worth Solving
If design itself is the process of turning inventions into innovations, then two guiding first principles are that it should be brought to bear on problems that are most worth solving, and that determining worthiness is an integral part of the design brief. The bestoutcomes in design projects come from carefully studying the stated problem in its context to ensure that there are not other larger or possibly hidden problems to solve instead. What are the problems most worth solving in lighting today? Below is a partial list.
Future of Work – According to Chester Thompson, San Francisco Lighting Studio Lead at WSP, one immediate problem to address is helping business owners to get employees back into the office. Lighting can play a key role, but it’s about enabling and empowering people, not simply more complex control systems, IoT or AI. He says, “Looking at how smart building technology actually impacts the lighting industry, what I’m finding is that it generally doesn’t benefit lighting. I don’t necessarily say that technology constitutes innovation. I think it still stems from your ability to close your eyes, visualize an end product and use the tools available to get there. Dynamic light or circadian lighting or any of that stuff…I don’t know that those are actually innovative.”
Building a Company – For Scott Yu, Chief Creative Officer for Vode, innovation is not simply about solving short-term technical product problems, but about building a culture and a system for innovation within the company itself. “I’m very interested in the Japanese practice of kata that Toyota uses, which is about continuous improvement. Lighting is such a tiny little industry, we’re very self absorbed. Typically a team takes one step, maybe one way, and then next year they take another step somewhere else, it’s a very scattered way of doing things. The Japanese are incredibly good in terms of optimizing and making a system almost perfect, until it doesn’t work anymore, then they learn from that and improve. I used to work in the automotive industry and still see it as a powerhouse of innovation. The first application of LEDs was in the automotive sector. And auto electrical systems are all DC. Now we’re working on a DC to DC building. Basically looking through the lens of these big movements outside of lighting, lighting is not really creating a lot of innovation. I think other areas are forcing this innovation onto lighting.”
Daylight and Views – For leading daylight and views researcher, author and advocate Lisa Heschong, fake windows and skylights are enabling technologies for windowless buildings. Good intentions – people think they’re solving for all the windowless spaces that exist, so they think they’re virtuous” But the main problem is that buildings are built with windowless or daylight- and view-poor spaces in the first place.
According to Ms. Heschong, the kind of innovation we need to be focusing on, especially in controls is that which empowers occupants with useful feedback. As building technology becomes more complex, a prevalent narrative is “black box” automation, where occupant input is difficult or not even allowed in the first place. This narrative is often justified by the assumption that controls are simply too complex for humans to be able to operate them. This is the view of AI that scares people, as AI developers often admit that even they don’t understand exactly how AI works inside the black box. It’s basically magic, immune to control. While this state of affairs may end up being disastrous on the internet, in buildings and other large-scale infrastructure like the electrical grid it’s utterly untenable.
DEIR – The lighting industry has recently been devoting much discourse to diversity, equity, inclusion, and respect. These areas are ripe for innovation in social and economic programs and initiatives. Notable organizations that have started in the past few years include Light Justice, North American Coalition of Lighting Industry Queers (NACLIQ), Equity in Lighting, Women in Lighting, and Women in Lighting and Design (WILD). According to Mariel Taviana Acevedo, Specification Sales at ALR in Portland, Oregon, “In the current space that we’re living in, when we talk about things like equity in lighting, justifiable lighting, and climate justice, innovation means looking at tools that we already have and figuring out how we can make them work for everybody.”
In this recent panel session Lisa Heschong proposes that we consider access to daylight and views a fundamental right. It will take many innovative initiatives in regulatory, political, and economic spheres to make this a reality.
Present Proofing
“Future-proofing” is a great example of Silicon Valley techno-centric marketing babble, right up there with “seamlessly integrated.” (As if!) It’s like the term “human-centric” in that we probably know what it’s supposed to mean but it still sounds wrong and clumsy. Unfortunately, “future proofing,” so carelessly thrown about, is typically misleading, sometimes disastrously so. In practical terms, we have to be able to purchase, install, and operate a lighting system without having to rip it out in three to five years because it’s obsolete or no longer code-compliant. Why wouldn’t anyone want to “proof” against that?
But…it’s complicated. To begin with, the entire electrical system in the U.S. has evolved over the past 140 years or so to deliver AC long distance from centralized generation to buildings, where power needs to convert to DC to drive LEDs. In lighting, we’re still in a phase of adapting a fundamentally DC system to a fundamentally AC system. Driver compatibility problems with LEDs are still rampant. Lighting controls are still often too expensive and complex for a large share of both commercial and residential markets, and with the addition of “IoT” are only becoming more so. Next, there’s still widespread uncertainty about the stability of the luminaire/lightbulb standard. Several years ago lighting manufacturers touted the end of the lightbulb and assured us that replaceable LED “modules” would be the future model. While lightbulbs (lamps) are not as widely used in commercial applications relatively, the residential market is now flooded with filament LED lamps of widely varying quality and dimmer-driver compatibility performance. And finally, widespread – often ludicrous – manufacturer claims of LED lifetimes often served to confuse the entire ROI calculation.
Mariel Acevedo told me about a recent LED installation she revisited, one where seven years ago she had specified the original luminaires which now needed replacing. The original manufacturer had promised a “backwards compatible” solution that unfortunately turned out to be a worst-case scenario. The manufacturer no longer made replacement parts, requiring a complete replacement of all the luminaires. So: wasted capital outlay, installation costs, and materials, erasing the energy savings that were supposed to pay for the original installation.
Conclusions
I attribute much of our failure to innovate in the lighting industry to many factors, but three stand out: miscalculating time scales; ignoring non-technical innovations and drivers; and ignoring user input.
In the history of, say the last 300 years, groundbreaking innovations seem to follow a certain pattern. First, the innovation is widely hailed as a solution for all human problems, and promises to bring unprecedented peace and prosperity. Next, it’s immediately used to gain economic, social, or political power, through destructive capabilities and “weaponization,” or exponentially increased productivity. Then, predictions of the time required for a full transition from the old technologies to the new are almost always unrealistic, impossible to predict, and off by decades or generations. In the case of lighting, we’re seeing information technology that developed at a historically anomalous very rapid rate colliding with building technologies and practice that evolved over millennia and is highly resistant to rapid change. Conversely, we have an electrical infrastructure that evolved relatively rapidly 100 years ago, but will require a much longer time period than we typically imagine to adapt to solid state lighting, DC to DC, decentralization, and full electrification.
Non-technology innovations are ignored for many reasons, not the least being that building designers and engineers aren’t typically trained in human behavior, and behavioral experts rarely have anything to say about buildings. Some very impactful non-technology innovations are codes and standards, post occupancy evaluations, and certain financial models (each of which is suitable for a much longer discussion elsewhere).
Building systems and controls should empower building occupants. There is much data on the positive health and economic impacts of occupants being able to open windows, turn lights up or down, or regulate thermal comfort. But input from occupants is rarely considered, and when it is it’s after the fact, when systems are already installed. Building systems also especially must empower facilities operators and maintenance personnel. Despite all the hype, most “smart” building control systems today get shut down by facilities managers when they cease to function. Where does innovation come in here? Mariel Acevedo asks “is it innovative to say we’re going to sit down with the owners and ask them what they want their lights to do?” Probably not, but we can certainly innovate in developing and teaching better design standards and practices.
We become encumbered by technology when we forget what it’s for in the first place: to improve our human condition, and not just by increasing profit. In his monumental work Energy and Civilization, A History, Vaclav Smil writes “Knowing about the enormous inefficiencies of resource use, whether that resource is energy, food, water, or metals, by modern civilization, I have always argued for more rational ways of consumption. Such a course would have profound consequences for assessing the prospects of a high-energy civilization – but any suggestions of deliberately reducing certain resource uses are rejected by those who believe that endless technical advances can satisfy steadily growing demand. In any case, the probability of adopting rationality, moderation, and restraint in resource consumption in general and energy use in particular, and even more so the likelihood of persevering on such a course, is impossible to quantify.”
There is a hopeful message in this statement, which comes at the end of his book, perhaps the most extensive and detailed treatment existing of civilization seen through the lens of energy. When we focus on how we use energy to provide useful work, a term well known to physicists and engineers as the useful output of a system, mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc., rather than simply reducing energy use, we can take advantage of all the powerful capabilities technology provides. But we also need to redefine “useful work” in terms that aren’t exclusively mechanical, electrical, chemical, or economic, but are human: moral, social, biological, and ecological.
Read Part One of this series here.
Read Part Two of this series here.
Read Part Three of this series here.
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