Lighting Design

Peerless Lighting and Acuity Brands Controls, both of whom I’m proud to call clients, have joined forces to launch Lighting for Learning, an online tool that helps school designers design optimal lighting for classrooms. First, the designer inputs the characteristics of the classroom and desired lighting features, such as light level, color quality, aesthetics and [...]

Big changes are in the works that will impact future lighting designs by eliminating some of the least-efficient and lowest-cost products from the market, while establishing ambitious new goals for energy codes that may severely limit design choices. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 expanded ballast regulations put into effect by the Department of Energy [...]

Recommendations on achieving 30% energy savings over minimum code requirements are contained in the newly published Advanced Energy Design Guide for Highway Lodging. The book, published by ASHRAE, gives guidance to architects, engineers, contractors and other building team members on how to easily achieve advanced levels of energy savings without having to resort to detailed [...]

The UK-based “Need Less” anti-light pollution group is now offering a free animation player that randomly plays six different clips that help raise awareness of the need to reduce light pollution and reduce energy consumption. The animation player is downloadable and can be placed on your web page to help spread the word. Check it [...]

Lighting designer and blogger James Bedell recently published an interesting post about design integrity–what happens after that perfect design is installed and subsequently is used and maintained over time. Check it out here.

Design Observer has published an excellent two-part article by Karrie Jacobs consisting of a discussion between lighting designer Leni Schwendinger and dark-sky activist Susan Harder about what constitutes good outdoor lighting. I had been following the article on LinkedIn, and then Leni sent me an email letting me know about the publication on the Design [...]

Here’s an article I wrote for the July issue of Electrical Contractor Magazine on the topic of a new residential lighting provision in the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), used by most states as the basis of their residential energy codes, that requires 50% of lamps in newly built homes to be “high efficacy”–that [...]

That’s the title of an article I wrote about lighting and the new LEED 2009 requirements, published in the July issue of Electrical Contractor. You can check it out here.

Back in April, I posted about BUG (Backlight, Uplight, Glare), a new classification system for outdoor light fixtures currently being promoted by the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA). Based on the TM-15–the upgrade of the roadway shielding classification system by the Illuminating Engineering Society and the Lighting Research Center–BUG addresses light emitted from the fixture in [...]