David Shiller

  I had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Butters, Founder & Executive Director of The Lighting Agora, about what the Agora is and where it’s heading. Shiller:  What was your original goal in establishing the Lighting Agora?  Butters:  I have always strived to work for the benefit of the lighting industry as a whole. In [...]

  Before a tsunami, the ocean withdraws out to sea. Similarly, the signs are growing that a new tsunami is about to hit the lighting industry. That is the integration of lighting controls with HVAC controls. Why? It’s well known that LED “socket saturation” as well as diminishing returns when LEDs are combined with advanced [...]

For a variety of reasons, Taiwanese businesses are reducing their investments in mainland China. One reason is the difficulties China faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the extreme challenges that were specific to China, including their unprecedented extended shutdowns of large commercial cities such as Shanghai, among others. Many larger, Taiwanese companies have been relocating [...]

Last week, the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) unveiled the Works with WELL Program, a new product licensing opportunity designed to help product manufacturers validate and showcase how their products align with the WELL Building Standard, based on IWBI licensing criteria. Nearly 40 early-adopting companies have enrolled more than 1,000 products in the new program. To earn [...]

  New research by Assistant Professor of Physics Xiao-Feng Qian, at the Stevens Institute of Technology has linked two separate fields of physics: Coherence Optics and Classical Mechanics. It introduces a universal relationship between the polarization of light and its entanglement properties. A new quantitative relationship between certain quantum properties of light are connected and [...]

Amazon.com announced in August that it is eliminating 27 of its 30 private label brands across home goods and apparel. Amazon Basics and Amazon Essentials will continue with opening price point apparel. The two Amazon private brands that offered residential lighting were Stone & Beam and Rivet. One published report said both of these private [...]

  The largest peer-reviewed study to date links WELL Certification with improved worker productivity, health, and creativity. Earlier this month, the study was published in Building & Environment and found that WELL Certified building occupants reported higher performing workplaces compared with non-certified building occupant responses. The researchers found that employee satisfaction across various building aspects [...]

  The number of existing homes sold, from January through August of this year, dropped 21% compared with the same period last year. And that’s on top of an 18% decline last year from two years ago. The data is from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). For the month of August, home sales fell [...]

  The ceiling systems industry has been gradually integrating LED lighting for some time. Now they are taking it to new heights (pun intended). Barz® + Brilliance™ is a single comprehensive linear solution from USG Ceilings Plus, with integrated lighting that is fully customizable. It’s a high-end custom solution offering static and color-tunable lighting features, [...]