SMART THINKING: DR SHELLEY JAMES
HUMAN CENTRED LIGHTING - TRICK OR TREAT?
Dr Shelley James, founder of the Age of Light Innovations Group, PhD from the Royal College of Art, international expert on light and well-being, and recent speaker at EI Live! 2021 explains why human centric lighting is so important. Sounds like marketing hype? Expensive? Difficult? I hope to convince you by the end of this article that it’s not difficult and it’s not expensive. And getting it right could help you to build lifelong relationships with your clients, help them to save money and cut their carbon footprint too. How many of you are ‘morning’ people? Do you have teenage children who struggle to get out of bed? Most of the time we have to work on the same ‘time zone’ but science shows that everyone is slightly different - and that changes over time. Distribution of chronotypes (that’s when you naturally feel awake and when you’d rather be in bed), how much sleep you need and how that changes over time varies a lot. For example, a teenager’s body clock runs around two hours later than an adult: your 7am is 5am for them. And over the age of 70, you might turn into an extreme night owl - or an early bird. One experiment in a London school changed the start time to 10:00am so that the kids could get the eight hours they need. The results were impressive - reduced illness after two years fell
58 NOVEMBER 2021
by 50% and improved academic performancereversed once the start time went back to ‘normal’ and a 12% increase in the value-added number of students making good academic progress. And how many of you are over 40 years of age? You won’t have noticed because those changes happen slowly over time. But your eyes are slowly becoming cloudy and yellowing with age. By the time you’re 40, you need twice as much light as a 10-year-old to get the same effect. A recent study by the CIE (The Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage) suggests that women prefer warmer light and will still polish off a large breakfast even though it’s in a room with only blue light, because we have a better sense of smell, so we can override the slightly odd look of the food on offer. The point is that you are all human - there is an ‘average’ - like the sound level from a loudspeaker or the amount of treble you want in the mix, but everyone is different and that’s where the ‘human-centred’ bit comes in.
So, what we call ‘circadian’ (circa = around, dian = day) simply means lighting that helps the body to know what time it is. That matters because every single cell in your body and brain works together like a super-efficient just in time delivery system. Your heart gets ready to pump up the pressure as you rise from your bed, your gut gets the chemicals ready to break down your breakfast and your brain draws power to process the inbox. That clock is such a powerful driver that when it gets out of whack, things start to go badly wrong. Lost sleep for one night is the equivalent of driving with a shot of whiskey in your blood. And over time, it’s, quite literally, lethal. The World Health Organisation has classified disruption to the circadian system as a probable carcinogen. And if you can remember what it feels like to be jet-lagged, you will probably have a glimpse of what that means: foggy brain, weight gain, low mood. Children who have disrupted body clocks are more likely to be obese, get lower scores at school and have an increased risk of suicide. So, your body clock is highly personal, very important and it uses light to tell the time.
/Essentialinstall
@Install_mag
essentialinstall.com
