FEATURE ARTICLES

Increasing Awareness, Reducing Bad Design Choices

Stefan needs only to walk out the front door of his offices and stroll around downtown Ypsilanti, Mich. to see evidence of the bad design that proliferates in our world.

“They did some new streetlighting, and used super high-glare roadway lighting. It’s high-pressure sodium. Bad color. Nothing to attract people to the downtown district. Sure, it looks great during the day when the lights are off. They’re real cute fixtures. But at night, it’s a bad design of illumination. I call it ‘the prison effect’,” Stefan says.

It’s not just on streets. He sees evidence of poor lighting choices in new office buildings, hospitals, and other public places where “doing the right lighting thing” would have made a world of difference.

Stefan estimates that only 5% to 10% of the lighting being done today has had a professional lighting designer’s hand in it. Among the missing elements, then, is the advice from people who know how to maximize all light sources—including the impact of properly placed daylighting.

“When I do seminars, I ask: ‘How many of you enjoy offices with no windows?’ Guess how many hands go up. Like none. So hello, architects?”

“Very few architects think about this and make a commitment to incorporating daylight as an important element in environments where the performance of workers is important. They think it’s not cost-effective. But look at an analysis of the cost of office workers for 10 years, and the lost cost of productivity (in a poorly designed space) would pay for the difference.”

Ultimately, he believes the situation is a lawsuit-waiting-to-happen.

“Right now, people think of lighting design as very utilitarian. You hit a switch, the lights go on, and everything’s OK.

“Unfortunately, what’s probably going to happen is there’s going to be some major lawsuit by a large corporation. They’re going to sue somebody who did a lighting design for a space that wasn’t up to current standards, and the architect or designer would have to replace the entire system—and make up for the lost productivity of the past years.”

Stefan has a self-described “personal crusade for lighting awareness and education,” and participates as a master teacher, time permitting. Lately he’s been teaching about light, color and visual perception. “I’ve been helping people understand how visual perception is affected by color kelvin and color rendering from different sources, and how to use color tints and color filters, to create different effects.”

Another passion is teaching architectural lighting techniques to theatrical lighting designers who want to make the same kind of segue he did.