Earlier this year, the U.S. General Service Administration (GSA) published LED Lighting and Controls Guidance for Federal Buildings. The guide was authored by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The document provides guidance for Federal agencies to select the most cost-effective and energy-efficient lighting systems available. It [...]

  The other day, I heard a repeat of an old Planet Money radio show episode on NPR about the history of light. Rather than just focus on the changes in technology over thousands of years, it really focused on the economic history of light. The story interviews a Yale economics professor who studied how [...]

  Having created many hundreds of lighting product spec sheets, here are my suggested tips for improving their clarity, design, and completeness: UNDERSTAND THE PURPOSE Always remember that the spec sheet has two purposes. The first is as a document to help sell the product, by highlighting up-front the key features, benefits, differentiation, and overall [...]

  After 7 years of publishing the lightED website, NAED’s tED magazine will stop publishing lightED and start publishing a new website, electrifiED, focused on electrification and the associated supply chain. All past lightED articles and future articles about lighting will be relocated to tedmag.com. Starting Monday, July 1, electrifiED will be published at www.tedelectrified.com [...]

      The Design Lights Consortium (DLC) has published a new Lighting Controls Best Practices document that explains five basic networked lighting control (NLC) strategies: dimming, high-end trim, occupancy/vacancy sensing, scheduling, and daylight harvesting and gives an overview of how to implement them to maximize energy savings. The guide is written to describe each [...]

By The LIA & 42 Partners ltd A lot of photometric data in the form of LDT and IES files pass across our desks, the majority of them are problematic. Lighting designers use advanced tools like Relux and Dialux to produce incredibly detailed lighting designs with near photorealistic renderings of the lighting effects. They use [...]

    It’s time to meet one of the strangest animals on earth. They’re a form of sea slug called Leaf Sheep. The most striking thing about Leaf Sheep is that they remove the chloroplasts from the algae they eat and collect them in external tubular structures called rhinophores. The collected algal chloroplasts continue to [...]

  Sure, you’re a hardcore lighting person, but what about the teenagers in your life? Camp CANDLE is an architectural lighting design summer camp for high school students. It’s located at Penn State University, with one of the top lighting / architectural engineering programs in North America. The goal of Camp CANDLE is to increase awareness [...]

  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 [...]