Health and wellbeing
May/June 2020
Although now more than a decade old, Cundall's scheme for the RIBA Award-winning repurposing of Bourneville Place, Birmingham, is an exemplar of use of daylight
he past few years have seen a huge shift in workplace design and the focus is now firmly on health and wellbeing in all its facets, including lighting design. This change has come about from the introduction of standards and guides such as WELL, Fitwel and the BCO Wellness Matters publication, to name a few. Alongside these more recent documents, which are championing health and wellbeing, are the stalwarts of the lighting industry such as the SLL Lighting Handbook, SLL LG7 (Lighting for Offices) and the likes of BSEN12464-1 (Indoor Workplace lighting). These documents focus on our visual needs when lighting spaces. In addition to the above you also now have almost weekly case studies, research papers and opinion pieces (such as this) on lighting design and its impact on health, wellbeing, productivity, alertness, sleep quality and so on. Then there's the BRE's research project, The Biophilic Office. The question is, between all these documents and armed with all this knowledge, whether we still actually know what healthy lighting design is. The phrase 'healthy lighting' relates to learned papers such as Measuring and Using Light in the Melanopsin Age (by Prof Robert Lucas et al) and Light as a Circadian Stimulus for Architectural Lighting (by Mark Rea and Mariana Figueiro of New York's Lighting Research Center), among many more. Equally the phrase healthy lighting captures all the different badges which the standards, guides and manufacturers now use, such as circadian lighting, human centric lighting, biodynamic lighting and equivalent melanopic lux. I keep writing the phrase ‘to keep things simple, healthy lighting means…’ but no sooner have I written the phrase than I delete it as the reality is that designing healthy lighting is not simple. Why? There are a number of reasons. The first and most significant reason is that in the world of lighting (this includes scientists, researchers, designers and professional bodies) there is currently no agreement on what the criteria should be. Furthermore, there are no criteria on what we absolutely shouldn’t do, which is far more of an issue. We will come back to this. Other reasons are more commercial. For example, developers need to see a return on their investment and the sooner the better – does installing a healthy lighting system achieve that?
© Martine Hamilton Knight
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WELL MEANING The focus in the workplace is now firmly on health and wellbeing. But do we know what lighting for health is or how to achieve it? asks Andrew Bissell Twitter: @sll100
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