The best lighting design is the one you don’t notice. Coco Chanel once said: “dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman.” It’s the same with lighting. If you notice the light sources, and you can feel annoyed by them, then the design just doesn’t work. Essentially, there’s more to lighting than first meets the eye.
This is no mean feat, as good lighting is a workplace’s holy grail – whether you work from the office, kitchen table or a manufacturing facility. The right ambience will help to create a safe, comfortable and positive physical space, which is proven to boost alertness – and may also impact on performance and productivity given the right circumstances; a necessity as the UK’s economy emerges from lockdown.
It’s a chain reaction and it makes business sense to get it right, more now than ever before. The challenge, therefore, is to ensure that lighting design supports everyone’s needs and respects its environment, as well as meeting the brief from an aesthetic, functional, efficiency and management perspective – this will help to create a happier and productive workforce, as well as become a more comfortable place to work.
So, as more workers return to the workplace, what is the key to good lighting design in the office?
Firstly, an office needs to provide a combination of the right lighting effects (e.g. direct or indirect, ambience, accent) and illuminance levels for its workers – without this, bad lighting could lead to a range of issues, such as eye strain, headaches and fatigue, all of which impact on productivity, workers’ health and wellbeing, and consequently the bottom line. At the same time, using high quality light sources and well-designed lighting equipment is crucial for the overall success and longevity of every project. This also ensures that glare problems are limited and flicker issues would not affect occupants in the future.
A sense of control
In order to allow lighting levels to provide a comfortable working environment, it’s essential for staff to have the ability to control it from within each workplace. Likewise, lighting also needs to be functional and meet the needs of its environment on a practical level.