Interior lighting

Overemphasising luminaire efficiency, at the expense of application efficiency, can result in offensive glare or gloomy spaces, even while conserving energy.

The "greening" of commercial construction and renovation is not a fad. More than 30 states, 135 cities and 10 Federal agencies now require or encourage new public buildings to register with the LEED green-building rating system. As public construction continues to benefit throughout 2010 and 2011 from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds, green-building practices are more important now than ever before. By 2013 McGraw-Hill Construction predicts that the green-building market will grow to 25 percent of the value of all new construction starts, or about $140 billion.

In the professional discipline of lighting, this is creating extraordinary opportunities to design lighting solutions that provide effective lighting output with optimal visual comfort, attract interest, and reveal form and architecture indoor and outdoor. It is also creating extraordinary risks, as designers are pressured to emphasise LEED points over the quality of lighting performance and efficiency metrics over people's needs. This is not to say that lighting should not be efficient : lighting should be very efficient; but the metrics of efficiency tell only part of the story of what lighting does. Overemphasising these metrics can still result in unintended offensive glare or gloomy spaces...