BALANCING PEOPLE, PLACE AND PLANET

JULY/AUGUST 2021 LIGHTING JOURNAL 17

Lighting design

King’s Cross Station, London, showing its innovative diagrid shell. The concourse lighting scheme by Arup uses colour-stable ceramic-based metal-halide projectors to uplight the structure, creating a light and airy atmosphere. Photograph by Hufton + Crow Photography. In May, Arup’s global lighting design leader Florence Lam (inset) became the first woman to receive the prestigious SLL President’s Medal for her lifetime contribution to lighting and lighting design. Photograph by Thomas Graham

Renowned lighting designer Florence Lam was awarded the SLL’s President’s Medal in May for her lifetime contribution to the industry, becoming the first woman to receive the accolade. Lighting Journal spoke to her about lighting beyond the pandemic, how spaces can be made safer and more inclusive, and the need for ‘humanity-centred’ lighting

By Nic Paton

The Society of Light and Lighting’s (SLL) President’s Medal is its highest accolade and designed to recognise ‘a significant and lifetime’ contribution to lighting.

Its most recent recipient, for 2020, was announced in May as Florence Lam, global lighting design leader at Arup and, notably, the first woman to receive the prestigious award.

Florence co-founded Arup’s lighting practice in 2000, growing the practice from a small team of four in London to a global practice of more than 120 designers across 12 countries.

Landmark projects (to name but some) have included the V&A Design Museum in

The Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Arup’s scheme here is focused on the controlled use of daylight, with daylight introduced from above rather than just through

windows. Sunlight is also excluded from the laboratory spaces so as to provide a high level of visual comfort and glare control. Photograph: Hufton + Crow Photography

Dundee, the British Museum’s World Conservation Centre, King’s Cross Station, Leicester Square, the California Academy of Sciences, the Tai Kwun Centre of Heritage and Arts, Stonecutters Bridge in Hong Kong and The Acropolis Museum in Athens.

Florence is also renowned for her research and evidence-based approach to lighting design, and she is a visiting professor for lighting design and engineering at the UCL Bartlett’s Institute of Environmental Design and Engineering.

Lighting Journal had the privilege to sit down with Florence in June (virtually of course) to discuss her accolade and, as importantly, consider how the unprecedented year we have just been through is changing, and needs to change, lighting and lighting design.

Florence, first of all, emphasised how much being awarded the President’s Medal has meant to her. ‘I am really thrilled and honoured to have been chosen as the recipient. I use the word “recipient” rather than “winner” because it wasn’t something I entered; it was a complete surprise. I’m really, really happy and excited about it, but also I am excited about being the first woman to receive this award and absolutely humbled by it,’ she said.

‘I would say, however, it is also more of a testament to our whole lighting practice. There are many who should be sharing this with me because it is not just my own effort, it is a team effort. It is also a very powerful endorsement for me and has given me the impetus to keep doing what I am doing; my commitment to bringing research into design, broadening the influence of industry, really wanting to shift the conversation from “human-centric” to “humanity-centric” lighting, and to drive innovation so that we can really light our way towards a more sustainable future,’ she added.

ROLE OF LIGHTING IN REGENERATION

We’ll return to Florence’s idea of ‘humanity-centred’ lighting shortly but, in terms of her emphasis on bringing research into lighting design and looking beyond the pandemic, Florence highlighted Arup’s recent report The role of lighting in supporting town centre regeneration and economic recovery [1].

Richard Morris, associate lighting designer at Arup, wrote on this for Lighting Journal earlier this year (‘Social landscaping’, February 2021, vol 86, no 2). The report made the argument that lighting potentially has a pivotal role in revitalising high streets and town centres post-pandemic, in improving perceptions of safety (a topic we’ll also return to shortly), in creating new community spaces, and in helping local authorities better to support their night-time economies.

This work sits alongside Arup’s ongoing work around lighting the urban night-time. The ‘Cities Alive’ project, led by Florence, for example is considering how to make nighttime lighting more effective, how we can better understand how people want to use city spaces, how light affects our bodies and our behaviours at night, and why we need darkness as well as light at night [2].

It will also feed into the launch this month of the Light for Future project [3]. This is a project launched by the IALD and iGuzzini to four of the most important international lighting design studios: Arup, Licht Kunst Licht, Light Bureau and Speirs Major on the use of light as a tool for social innovation and urban redevelopment.

As Florence explained: ‘We have gathered together some of the youngest members of our team to explore how we can use light as an educational tool to raise awareness about climate change, to encourage social interaction and also cohesion, in building community resilience.

‘The ideas is that those who see light, and get touched by light, will get inspired so that they themselves can also make personal commitments to drive change for the environment and sustainable future,’ she added.

At a practical level, Arup has created a set of bespoke light-projecting GOBOs specifically for the project, highlighting air (representing air pollution), bees (to symbolise loss of biodiversity), water (to raise awareness about our scarce resources) and, lastly, carbon – the combustion of which generates

JULY/AUGUST 2021 LIGHTING JOURNAL 19

Lighting design

The Zaha Hadid-designed London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics. Arup’s scheme needed to celebrate the complex geometry and illuminate the

distinctive long-span roof. This scheme, again, is very much focused on controlled daylight and low-energy solutions. Photograph: Hufton + Crow Photography

the energy needed for human activities but of course, at the same time, is harmful for the environment. ‘We made them to articulate a narrative that invites people to think about human activities, how our activities impact the environment,’ Florence pointed out.

NEED FOR MORE INCLUSIVE SPACES

How, then, did Florence feel the pandemic has changed our perceptions of exterior spaces? Night-time design post-pandemic has been a topic much discussed within Lighting Journal and the ILP in the past year (‘Dark design’, September 2020, vol 85 no 8, ‘Remaking the night’, July-August 2020, vol 85 no 7).

Is the fact we are being encouraged to live, work and engage in more open, ventilated spaces (including, of course, the great outdoors) likely to change how we perceive public realm lighting and what we will expect from it in the future? Alongside this, and especially in the wake of the tragic murder of Sarah Everard in March, does lighting as an industry need to be having a more urgent debate around how light and lighting can be used to make spaces safer and more inclusive at night?

In answer, Florence cited research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that concluded only twothirds of people generally feel safe after dark walking alone, and only half of Australian women [4]. Arup’s Melbourne office had also recently done a study with Monash University in 2019 on women’s experiences of using the city, both during the day and at night [5].

‘What we found was that the discrepancies were less to do with the actual lighting evaluation for those spaces and more about how the lighting was perceived. It was not just the light levels on the ground but how lights are creating the night-time impression of the space. So it does depend, for example, on the choices of trees – you have got those as vertical surfaces on buildings etc – the creation and use of shadow, the colour of light, the colour-rendering properties of light as well,’ Florence pointed out.

‘The fundamental question, therefore, we really want to challenge is: are spaces designed for safety after dark? How can we bring a more holistic approach to create truly inclusive places for cities after dark? How can we bring an approach that means everybody feels safe?” she added.

UNDERSTANDING SPATIAL CONTEXT

Lighting designers, Florence argued, therefore need to look at and evaluate the context of the place they are lighting as much as the actual physical space itself. They may need to include day and nighttime pedestrian flow patterns, for example, how the lighting design interacts with people and place after dark, how it affects the perception of safety and so on.

‘We don’t just come in and say, “we know everything and this is what you need to have”. It is much more contextually based. It is also about how to do stakeholder inclusion rather than just engagement, so that the stakeholders are part of the design solution for these urban spaces,’ Florence said.

‘If we pick up on the Sarah Everard case for example, there are a lot of other issues around it as well, but I think from a lighting/night-time perspective, it is certainly something that we could do better at, as lighting professionals and as cities as well. How we can holistically consider the afterdark environment properly,’ she added.

Part of this needs to be about designers working harder to educate both clients and the public about what ‘good’ lighting really means and can do, Florence contended.

‘We can expand the vocabulary that people use about lighting beyond just bright and dark, or maybe “glary”; to understand that lighting has a purpose beyond just the functional, or beyond just making a place look beautiful. That it has a very, very important role to play in shaping spaces so that people can be encouraged to interact and socialise with each other, or enhance the cultural asset of those places,’ she emphasised.

This will, however, also require the industry to be generating conversation and engagement beyond just other lighting professionals. ‘If we keep talking among ourselves as a lighting industry

Lighting design

The California Academy of Sciences, which is deemed the most sustainable museum in the world. In the rainforest dome Arup’s lighting engineers had to measure the amount of daylight

entering and provide an artificial lighting solution to compensate for any light deficit on overcast days. Photograph by Tim Griffith

and never break out to the public or even the politicians, nothing is going to change. We need to step out there and speak to people, to influence policy,’ Florence said.

‘We need to go beyond just talking about the lighting and how you get to see things, or get to see places beautifully, to actually how light and lighting matters to society. Of how you can bring people back to city centres or how you can make sure people feel safe in city centres. We need to be able to demonstrate the evidence as well,’ she added.

NEED FOR ‘HUMANITY-CENTRED’ LIGHTING

All of which brings us back to Florence’s idea of ‘humanity-centred’ lighting. This, she emphasised, is very different to human-centric lighting. It is about effecting a step-change that goes far beyond just tweaking colour temperature throughout the day or looking to save energy through part-night dimming.

‘The conversation around the lighting industry has very much been about “human-centred” or “human-centric” lighting. The reason why I shift that to “humanity” is because I really want our conversations to evolve from sustainable to regenerative design,’ Florence explained.

‘That is why I want the approach really to switch from human- to humanity-centred design. What I really mean by “humanity” is to really embrace the United Nation’s 17 “social development goals” [6]. Lighting is not just about people and society but about the planet as well.

‘We want to go beyond “sustainability”, not only focusing on limiting consumption, energy, carbon and so on, and move to a more regenerative approach. This means we are designing an environment that has a symbiotic relationship, integrating human activity with the physical, the built element – buildings, bridges – to also nature, the ecological systems,’ Florence said.

‘When I talk about “humanity”, yes that covers human-centric lighting and all the perspectives of wellbeing, health and wellbeing, daylight and night-time design.

‘But it is also about mitigation, the circular design approach to lighting, lighting as a design philosophy starting from net zero impact. We want to be one step further; it is about how can light actually contribute to and support biodiversity gain day and night, things like biodiversity net gain, urban greening, for example? It is building in a whole, holistic approach. From the lighting perspective, for lighting to be truly for people and planet, we need to talk about “humanity”,’ she added.

ENGAGEMENT AND COLLABORATION

If everyone in lighting simultaneously made one small change to how they currently worked, what change did Florence feel would be the most impactful or beneficial to society?

‘I think we all can do one small change, and ideally all different – because then the total will add up to many, many different changes!’ Florence replied.

‘We are very social professionals. We talk to each other a lot, we network a lot, we are curious to know what each other is doing; we share a lot as a community. But I think what we might not have done enough is to advocate and campaign for good lighting, engage with people outside the industry, outside our immediate community, on why lighting matters and the big potential impact and benefits we can have for society at large,’ she added.

Finally, what role did Florence feel the ILP, and individual ILP members, could play in these important conversations? How can industry bodies such as the ILP and others make a difference?

‘The ILP, definitely, is a great hub for the lighting community, practitioners from all walks of life coming together, whether it is manufacturers, academia or practitioners,’ she emphasised.

‘It is about encouraging every member in their own sphere of influence to look outward, so that we can get the bigger lighting message out and be able to really make a positive change for society,’ Florence added.

[1] ‘The role of lighting in supporting town centre regeneration and economic recovery’, Arup: https://www.arup.com/perspectives/publications/promotional-materials/section/the-role-of-lighting-in-supporting-town-centre-regeneration-and-economicrecovery [2] ‘Cities Alive – lighting the urban night-time’, Arup, https://www.arup.com/perspectives/cities-alive-lighting-the-urban-night-time [3] ‘Light for the future’, iGuzzini, https://cdn5.iguzzini.com/news/light-for-future/ [4] ‘How’s Life? 2020’, OECD, https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/c82850c6-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/c82850c6-en; ‘The Australia we want’, Community Council for Australia, https://www.communitycouncil.com.au/content/australia-we-wantsecond-report [5] ‘More lighting in cities alone does not create safer cities for women’, Monash University, https://lens.monash.edu/@design-architecture/2019/05/29/1375201/more-lighting-alone-does-not-create-safer-cities-for-women [6] The United Nations in 2015 set out 17 ‘sustainable development goals’ designed to be adopted by all UN member states as part of its ‘2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’. These include ending poverty and hunger; ensuring healthy lives and wellbeing; promoting inclusive, sustainable and resilient infrastructure; tackling climate change and others. A list of the full 17 can be found at https://sdgs.un.org/goals