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Innovation

The lighting quotient: why good light matters

Bad light can hinder office productivity and road visibility. So why don't we improve it? Allison Schieffelin, chief executive at The Lighting Quotient, explains what's at stake.
Written by Andrew Nusca, Contributor

When we renovate our homes and office buildings, we think about the furniture, the wall colors, the windows -- but we rarely think about how the artificial lighting will impact our enjoyment of the space.

Often, we don't notice it unless it's terrible. Even then, we can't quite put our finger on why we don't like working in a particular room. (What is it about my office? Oh, right -- the strips of clinical fluorescent lights blanketing my LCD computer monitor.)

SmartPlanet sat down with Allison Schieffelin, chief executive for The Lighting Quotient, a West Haven, Conn.-based company that specializes in bringing better light to schools, libraries, museums, sports venues, hospitals, highway signs and -- yes, you guessed it -- corporate offices.

But it's not just any kind of light. Schieffelin's company has won numerous design awards for its innovation around lighting technology -- specifically, how light is distributed.

She told us how increased pressure to reduce the energy consumption of lighting has sparked a wave of new research and development. We found the conversation, well, illuminating.

SP: Who needs better light, and why?

AS: That's a great question. It's not just a need for better light, it's that lighting itself accounts for a huge portion of the total energy used in industrialized nations. North of 20 percent. In looking at energy efficiency overall, our company and this industry are very much at the nexus of the most important agenda in the world and in this country.

Whenever you talk about better, leaner, cleaner, greener buildings, you must talk about lighting.

Lighting, when done well, is barely noticed. Versus the water that comes out of your tap. It's very hard to get the world's attention centered around lighting. In the built office environment, we've seen as much as 1.8 watts per square foot. With legislation, such as Title 24 in California, standards are being set that call for reduction in energy use.

We do not manufacture much product for residential. I wouldn't say it's entirely commercial -- our largest body of work over time would be institutional: K through 12 schools, universities, monuments, roadways and other transportation, such as the recent JetBlue terminal [at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City].

Offices are so important because there is so much commercial office space. Billions of square feet. The impact can be absolutely phenomenal.

SP: What changes in the lighting industry has energy efficiency brought?

AS: In order to remain relevant as an independent manufacturer in the United States, we are finding that we've got to increase the rate at which we are innovating and pushing new technology to be able to perform to the standards that are required to achieve maximum efficiency.

The only path is innovation and the development of intellectual property.

The challenge for us is that the size of the overall LED industry growing into the tens of billions of dollars in a very short time frame. There are a lot of eager participants that want a piece of that pie. The backlash [around LED light in general] comes from mass-manufacturing of low quality LED product that fails to win in two critical ways, both with respect to controlling the optics of LEDs -- putting the light where it has greatest effect -- and efficacy, in terms of thermal protection of them. There is an exponential drop-off in the performance of LEDs as they get hot. The LED emitters themselves are very, very sensitive to heat.

We're addressing that by using optical-grade acrylic to literally bend light in such a way to use the maximum amount of light and radiate heat away from the emitters ourselves.

There has been a big backlash against shoddy product. There's a big push to moving manufacturing overseas that we resisted because we didn't have the resources to control the quality of the product and protect our own intellectual property. The way our Fraqtir product is being received is because of our attention to detail and being patient and waiting for the technology to catch up to us.

SP: What are the challenges? LEDs have a long way to go in the general lighting market.

AS: There are two. One is pop culture. Lighting technology got very hot very fast, in part because of the Department of Energy's interest in them. Some of the early participants gained big chunks of the business. We're relatively new. We don't have the resources of some of the behemoths in the industry.

We waited a really long time to enter because we were afraid of the end performance. Until the end of this year, linear fluorescent T5 or T8 lamps can dramatically out-perform, in lumens per watt as well as on a cost basis, LEDs. We are approaching a critical crossover.

There's always this constant challenge, and the big question is when is fluorescent going to truly be surpassed by LEDs, in performance, life and color. It is much more difficult to produce light in the warm light ranges -- 2700K to 3500K.

Blue LEDs are very controversial right now. We don't do them, but you see them everywhere. There are a lot of questions about blue LEDs with respect to scotopics, the study of colors and its effects on humans and animals. In some parts of the world, blue LEDs are banned. It causes wakening effects. The amber light is the end of day.

SP: How does light impact the way we work and live? And why do I have such a hard time concentrating at the office?

AS: Anyone from the IES [Illuminating Engineering Society --Ed.] or the true lighting thought leaders and architects of the world, such as the IALD [International Association of Lighting Designers --Ed.], have concluded that the harshness that you're experiencing in the office does affect your productivity.

It focuses on an issue called "balanced brightness." Your paper tasks, your computer tasks, getting up to walk around -- you have a big ratio, as much as 1 to 30, between the brightest thing in your office and your paper or computer tasks. You're not alone in having that reaction and wanting to remove fluorescent lamps from your fixtures. It's an effort to get the total lighting levels throughout your office balanced. Your actual task area has become too dim. It's been determined that you need 30 to 50 foot-candles on your work surfaces, without glare, so that there is no work for your eye.

Why does the light have to come out of the ceiling? It's interesting you wrote about Steelcase, because all of our solutions are around furniture. This year, there is complete depreciation -- 100 percent tax credit -- for redesigning built office environments. All of the systems we've designed use one lamp to do the power work of lighting the ambient space, at the same time, the optics are very specific to an asymmetric pattern on your desk space. Your eyes don't need to work overtime.

It's of matter particularly as we have an aging workforce. Eye strain has become a huge factor in worker productivity. A lot of universities -- Ohio, Washington -- are coming to the same conclusion.

SP: How are corporations receiving this insight? Can you sufficiently connect the dots between light and productivity to convince them?

AS: Worker productivity in dollars is hard to measure. I have not seen anything empirically perfect with respect to hours worked. That kind of controlled scientific study is underway.

But let's use your parent company, CBS. The law will require them to come within code in the next five years to have less than a watt per square foot. They'll have a decision to make. They can unscrew lights until you're working in a dim environment. The alternative is to upgrade the fixtures or change them out completely.

What we're finding is, on the part of landlords or developers or owners of the space, the benefits that accrue are the portability -- as you reconfigure your furnishings and workforce. There was an article in Crain's in January about the amount of workers that large companies like yours are cramming into offices.

Our parents had 400 or 500 square feet apiece [to work in]. People are working in 200, 150 and as little 120 square feet of space. We'll expand our workforce as the economy recovers. We can reconfigure when that happens. The benefits for the owner include tax incentives and worker concerns.

You don't have to be on a lift or ladder to service these fixtures, which OSHA likes. You don't have to pay overtime to service lights after employees leave. A huge stock of older buildings were built with asbestos. Rather than touch or reclaim it -- expensive, not always foolproof -- the best thing to do is cap it. You benefit from never having to touch it.

SP: What percentage of clients are actually interested in light performance, versus the expense?

AS: Unfortunately, the tail still wags the dog. The ROI, the payback in number of years or dollars is still very much at the forefront of people's minds. They know that they've got to reduce energy, and yet there is enough of a movement -- particularly in the [younger] generations moving into the workforce now -- that people will make decisions on where they work based on the environments that they'll work in.

People are very interested in the quality of light. If it's too expensive, it's not going to work. If the advantage is easy enough to see without too much of a cost burden, I really believe that the quality of light as it's recognized by guests who come into the work environment,

The hurdle and the challenge is getting enough people to sit in three spaces: an overhead trough of fluorescent power, an indirect pendant fixture with a task light, and a Tambient-lit workplace. Overwhelmingly, workers pick solution number three.

If I had my druthers, I would get you off this phone line and into my office so that you would have this personal experience of my office versus yours. It's probably the hardest marketing challenge we have. It is experiential. We do take it for granted when the lighting is good. And the facilities guy doesn't have to deal with the constant complaints about glare shields and overhead lighting.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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