12 minute read
Light Can Help Us #3: Knowing More and Feeling Better
BY DAVID K. WARFEL
It is all too easy for me to soothe a team member, upset after a meeting with a difficult client, with attempted humor: “Lighting design would be a lot easier without all these clients.” If our clients would trust us to make the decisions, provide us with an unlimited supply of cash, and stay out of the design process, we could achieve extraordinary results, every time. But instead, our clients push back, make cuts, fight the expense, and ask for more proof in the way of cost estimates, fixture options, calculations, and more, all while demanding we keep our fees in check. Lighting design for the residential market is easy; convincing clients to let us do our job is the real challenge.
There was a time when I was convinced that the ends justified the means. If I was a jerk, used scare tactics, or overwhelmed resistance with technical jargon, I could consider it a job well done, so long as the results were beautiful. This works to a point, but if the process is painful for our clients, then we have detracted from the experience even after the beautiful results are revealed. If we change our approach, I believe we can achieve extraordinary success while ensuring a better process for our clients along the way. Changing our approach can be as simple as changing our words.
In the first articles of this series, I explored the general concept of lighting terminology and proposed that we seek our own languages of light that communicate beyond “what” into the more powerful realm of “why.” I dug into beneficial darkness, the foundation upon which good light is built. I then looked at how light for our hands can help us see what we are doing so we can do it better.
Light, the first gift of the universe, can also help us know more and feel better. What client does not desire these?
KNOW MORE
I love tinkering with our lighting design process, constantly trying new things and incorporating refinements from proposal through delivery. I try to improve our pitch decks, our meeting agendas, our presentation graphics, our deliverables, and more. I enjoy every aspect of this work, from analyzing cost data to tweaking graphic designs to clarifying drafting notations, and language or wordsmithing is no exception. In fact, it might be the area of improvement with the biggest impact on our company. “No one talks about light the way you do” is a frequent response from new contacts, and we take that as very high praise indeed. Our language of light is focused on how light can help us live better lives. There is nothing sacred about the language of light I share here; I simply want to encourage you to think beyond task, ambient, accent, average illuminance levels and ceiling uniformity ratios when talking to a client.
Light for our feet, fears, faces, and places can help us know where we are, where we are going, and who we are with. In short, light can help us know more, and this constitutes our third so-called promise of light.
Light for our feet is taken for granted in nearly every residential application except on garden paths. Indoors, we expect light to hit the floor so we can see where we are going, but rarely do builders and homeowners consider lighting that delivers light for our feet without also flooding an entire room with light. This may be fine in daytime settings, but our homes are occupied more hours after dark than during the day. Why not consider light for our feet indoors just like a garden path outdoors?
There are plenty of reasons to have light for our feet: when our children were younger there were plenty of sharp plastic items on the floor to avoid. LEGO bricks conveniently come in nearly every color, so at least one is bound to blend in with the floor until you find it with bare feet. There are also plenty of reasons to keep light out of our eyes after sunset, so light for our feet is best when it comes from below our waistline and is directed away from our eyes and towards the floor.
Light for our feet can also help allay some of our fears, like the fear of stepping on a bug, tripping on a log or stepping into a hole. We may not intellectually fear falling into a hole inside our homes – this is more often a reality outdoors than in – but our primal brain will still be nervous and alert if the floor is difficult to see. We are afraid of the dark for other reasons, of course, like the inability to see something lurking overhead (every scary movie has us yelling at the screen, “Look up! It’s up there!”) or the ability to see who is coming towards us in the darkness (is that a monster, or my cousin?). Light for our fears, then, goes beyond our feet to provide light ahead and above us. Perhaps this kind of light is similar to (or even achieved by) ambient light, but the point is that our clients are more likely to understand the need for light for their feet and fears than they are some obscure, borrowed term like “ambient.”
Light for faces also helps us know more, specifically who we are with and what they are thinking or feeling. This can tie into light for our fears, like meeting someone in a dark alley, and not knowing until it is too late if they are who we think they are. But light for faces is also more than simply light for our fears; we communicate with each other, we understand each other, we connect to each other through non-verbal visual communication as much as we do with words. When we can see the emotions on the faces of our companions, we can know if they mean us harm (fear) or if they are feeling any other emotion such as being happy to see us, sad about something else, scared of us, or more.
Light for places helps us know where we are and where we are going, and this is critical outside at night. We can approach the well-lit front of a store with comfort even when the sidewalk is a bit dim because we can see where we are going. We can feel relaxed in a large hotel lobby if we can see a bit of the entire space; it is much harder to relax when the room tapers into total darkness.
Light for our feet, fears, faces, and places can help us know more. Try asking a client in your next meeting, “Would you consider ambient light to be important?” Then ask, “Would you like to be able to better read the emotions of your companions during after-dinner conversation?” The light may be the same; it is the words that drive the change.
FEEL BETTER
We have witnessed some pretty big changes in the lighting industry over the last few decades. When I began my career, the future of lighting appeared to be T5s, compact fluorescent downlights, and fiber optics. Today, we use entirely different technologies to deliver light more efficiently and creatively than ever before. We have seen even bigger changes in our scientific understanding of light and its impact on human wellbeing. In the late 1990s, I was concerned with painting a pretty picture, meeting recommended illuminance levels, and encouraging clients to consider energy-saving technologies. Sleep patterns were not part of my dialogue.
Today, we know that light and darkness, when used in the proper amounts at the proper times, can help us feel more rested in the morning, more alert in the afternoon, more relaxed in the evening. We know that light and darkness can help us sleep better, score higher on tests, and even heal faster. The industry’s research leaders are showing us new ways to think about light, and we are learning new acronyms like SCN and IPRGCs and new terms like social jet lag. It can be a bit overwhelming, but it is very exciting.
How can we talk to our clients about the benefits of light without diving into terms like “circadian” or “correlated color temperature?” Does a homeowner really need to learn to speak in degrees Kelvin? How can we talk to our clients about the benefits of light without getting technical?
Light for our bodies can help us feel better. This simple statement is based on the idea that light can help us live better lives but includes the type of light (for our bodies) and the intended result, the emotional and practical justification (to feel better). Ask a client if they are interested in circadian lighting and you will get an occasional “yes.” Ask a client if they are interested in feeling their best, and you will hear yes far more often.
How do we simplify the science so that an average client, who may devote a total of a mere twenty minutes to the subject over their entire lives, can make an informed decision? Here are a few possibilities, each of which is based in a shared common experience that clients already understand.
Talk about bedtimes. When we were raising our children, my wife and I enjoyed decent lighting but knew absolutely nothing about light’s impact on our children’s sleep. Like most parents, we had the lights on throughout the evening for dinner, reading, games, and brushing teeth. Then we turned them off, plunged the nursery into darkness, and were surprised when the children did not feel comfortable or instantly fall asleep. When we compare this to the alternative – gradually preparing children and ourselves for rest over the course of several hours through gradually changing light – it is easy to see that light could be a part of a more successful bedtime routine.
Talk about nutrition. Many of our clients have a basic understanding of food and nutrition; they know that eating Twinkies and french fries for every meal will leave them in poor health. Simply equating light to nutrition can be an easier way to discuss the value of light without getting too technical. For example, preparing a simple chart with nutrition over the course of a week in both fruits and light can quickly make the point that a fixed diet of 3000K white light is equivalent to malnutrition. You could use fear to motivate them: “Would you like to avoid malnutrition in light?” Or you could flip it to the positive: “We can recommend lighting that will provide a more complete nutritional profile for your family.” Either way, it is easier to understand than CCT and circadian and SCN.
Talk about daylight. I think one of the mistakes we made as an industry was marketing warm-dimming LEDs as “incandescentlike.” Yes, that was a solid appeal to nostalgia and recognition that fixed-white LEDs were somehow less desirable, but it missed the point. Warm-dimming LEDs are only incandescent-like because incandescent bulbs mimicked sunset. Some people like incandescent bulbs; nearly everyone likes a good sunset.
Talking about daylight (and nighttime) will get better results from your clients, but it does not stop there. Daylight – and the cycle of light and dark we experience in nature every day – is universal and universally desired. You could tell your clients that tunable white light that shifts from 2200K to 6000K over the
course of six hours and then back again with a relative shift in intensity will trigger reactions in your IPRGCs and then your SCN, resulting in increased melatonin production, but you could also just say, “We feel more relaxed when we watch a sunset around a campfire, and we can deliver some of that same experience every night.” We have tried both, and you can guess which approach yields happier clients and better lighting.
LIGHT CAN HELP US
Light can help us live our best lives, but we need to know why and how. Light for our feet, fears, faces, and places can help us know where we are going and who we are with. Light for our bodies can help us feel more alert in the morning and more relaxed in the evening. Combined with beneficial darkness and light for our hands that helps us do better, these promises of light can replace task, ambient, and acronyms that befuddle residential clients with more accessible terms that excite them.
When one of our clients chooses fixed white light from tidy grids of recessed downlights for their home, it is easy to blame them for making poor choices. Real change comes, however, when we change the words we use when we talk about light. Try changing your language of light with clients. The results may astound you.
Stay tuned for the next article in David’s Light Can Help Us series to learn more about how light can help us focus clearly and adapt to changes easily.
