We recently lost a potential client to a manufacturer who offered “free” lighting design services (so long as you purchased fixtures from them, of course, which have the cost of service buried into the sale price). My first reaction was indignation but, as is often the case, a closer look revealed a much more nuanced […]
Category: Uncategorized
Lighting: Useful, Harmful, or Both?
Coffee, when poured into a mug and consumed, delivers a strongly desired boost of energy through caffeine. The same coffee, when poured onto the laptop, can be ruinous. The question of usefulness or harmfulness, applied to coffee, is answered by the use. The same can be true for light, especially outside. But indulge me a […]
Daylight Confusion Time
Feeling a bit groggy as you start your workday today? Hundreds of millions of Americans will be a bit less productive this morning, require a bit more coffee, and be a little more grumpy than usual. Just like we were last year at this time, and likely will be again next year unless we change […]
We Need Commercialized Lighting Design.
Lately I have heard others describe my work and the work of my company as “not as good” as some others. They are right. That is my goal. I suspect that the average citizen, when asked to describe the work of an architect, might wander into descriptions of skyscrapers and art museums. Frank Gehry, Zaha […]
Breaking & Entering – with Light
Are you trespassing on your neighbors every night? I love my neighbors, mostly, except when they stand in their yard and go about watering their plants but send half of the water over the fence and on to my hamburger. Just to be clear, that never happens. Because I have good neighbors. And usually eat veggie burgers, […]
Light in the Stone/Digital Age
So much of our modern lives is digital that we scarcely stumble across the archaic digital versus analog debate. No one uses an abacus in high school math class. Finding a land line to make a phone call is increasingly difficult. Clacking typewriters have given way to silent computers. Some of us wear watches that […]
Light Can Help Us…in 2023
I am very, very excited about my writing plans for this blog in the year ahead. The excitement for this coming year began more than twelve months ago when I set a plan for my 2022 posts. I thoroughly enjoyed blogging in 2022. For the first time, my writing was guided by a year-long plan […]
THINK LIGHT: I wanna new (light) drug.
After more than twenty years in the lighting profession it is tempting to think I know it all. The truth, of course, is that I possess but a tiny fraction of the collected knowledge of light- and our body of understanding is growing much faster than I can learn. Let me give you an example. […]
Seeing is Believing
I am excited to share a milestone with you but also wondering if the three plus years I’ve been blogging has been a waste of time. I started writing as a selfish endeavor to help me be a better lighting communicator. Maybe I should have just built better lighting instead. In a perfect world, I could simply […]
The New Recruits
If you are one of my faithful readers that was sad in 2020 because I wrote only half my normal quantity of posts, I owe you an apology and an explanation. Of course, 2020 is a year that will go down in history as the year of “no apology needed.” I’m sorry I didn’t make […]