Kit Cuttle (right) recieves Leon Gaster Award from Dr Peter Boyce
This seminar is a CPD event organised by the College of Engineering and Built Environment, DIT, in conjunction with CIBSE Ireland and the Society of Light & Lighting.
It will be held in DIT Kevin St room KEG-007 on Thursday, 19 October starting 6pm.
Commencing with warm finger food, sandwiches, and tea/coffee from 5.45pm with the presentations beginning at 6.30pm sharp.
The seminar is based on designing interior lighting for appearance and surrounding brightness, rather than designing lighting for functionality and vision only, as is the case at present. Indeed, it seems remarkable that most interior lighting design is still based on methods first developed in 1916. Despite many proposals, minor variations and additions since, the illuminance on the horizontal plane remains the dominant metric in lighting installations worldwide, despite the fact that the type of work and visual task has changed dramatically in recent years.
So, what then is good quality lighting in a modern interior? According to the SLL Code, this allows you see things quickly and easily without visual discomfort, but also serves to raise the human spirit. Up to now this latter higher ambition to raise the spirit has largely been left to dedicated lighting designers implementing imaginative and creative designs. Lighting Codes tended to settle for ensuring avoidance of bad lighting.
The SLL Code states — “Lighting recommendations are useful for eliminating bad lighting and following recommendations is usually enough to ensure indifferent lighting is achieved… and bad lighting avoided”. There is little ambition in the Code that those adhering to the Code will achieve good quality lighting.
It is clear that working and living environments generally are changing with increased use of screen technology and consequently, user demands for higher levels of comfort and societal demand for lower energy use are increasing. The above and the ubiquitous use of LED lighting offers opportunity for legislators and practitioners to consider a paradigm shift to a new lighting design methodology.
In 2010 Christopher (Kit) Cuttle — a New Zealand lighting designer/researcher — proposed a radical new approach to lighting design. He aimed to close the gap between the lighting design community and the engineering community which relied heavily on horizontal illuminance (Eh) as the dominant metric in design, and argued that a new design methodology was appropriate. This new method would be achievable by consultant engineers using reasonably-standard techniques and software for all but the most demanding and high-end projects. In other words, the aim was to raise the standard of lighting generally to good quality lighting, rather than the indifferent quality lighting accepted as the norm.
Kit proposed we move from designing lighting purely for visual needs to providing lighting that contributes more positively to people’s comfort and appreciation of the spaces they work in and inhabit. This means working towards designing lighting for appearance and surrounding brightness and then focusing on visual needs, rather than designing lighting for functionality and vision only.
Further to that proposal Kit collaborated with the Dublin Institute of Technology in endeavouring to get lighting legislators to change their codes and to persuade engineers to change their practices in this regard. Underpinning this is multiple PhD research, the findings of which will be presented at this event.
The speakers:
(Dr) Kit Cuttle
Kit Cuttle has had a long and varied career in lighting. He has worked on daylighting at Pilkington Bros in the UK, taught illuminating engineering and, more lately, lighting design at the University of Wellington, New Zealand, he was a researcher and academic at the Rensselaer Lighting Research Centre in Troy, NY, and the University of Auckland, New Zealand, as well as writing several books on the subject of lighting. Throughout his career he has been known for his willingness to push the boundaries of lighting metrics and this is evident in his current attempts to convert people away from performance to perception-based metrics. It was this drive that led to a successful collaboration with DIT and the achievement of a PhD by Publication.
Dr James Duff
Dr James Duff is from Dublin and completed multiple degrees in electrical services engineering/energy management and Maths; and a PhD undertaken part-time whilst working for Arup, which he completed in late 2015. He is a senior designer in lighting with Arup, Dublin. James won the prestigious KPMG Excellence Award for Emerging Talent in 2016 and is named as one of World’s top 40 Lighters under 40. He continues his work researching into new lighting metrics and continues to collaborate with researchers in DIT as part of this.Pic.2: James Duff is presented with the KPMG Excellence Award for Emerging Talent in 2016 by Paul O Connell at the Irish independent Property Excellence Awards 2016. Pic Iain White.
Anotello Durante
Antonello Durante is an Italian designer. He has a Master degree in architecture and a specialisation in lighting design from the University of Rome. He has acquired experience in the fields of restoration and design. Antonello is currently a PhD researcher within Dublin Institute of Technology and a lighting designer with Arup, Ireland.
Dr Kevin Kelly
The evening will be introduced by Dr Kevin Kelly who supervised the lighting research described above in DIT. He is a current CIBSE Vice-President, Past President of the Society of Light & Lighting (SLL) who publish the Code and Guides for Lighting used in nearly 100 countries and is a former Chairman of CIBSE Ireland. He is Head of the School of Multidisciplinary Technologies in DIT.
For more information about this event, please contact:
Email: sll@cibse.org Telephone: 0208 772 3685