Was this what attracted you to lighting?

“Definitely, being involved in a creative concept process with a team of people is one of the most rewarding experiences you can have. In fact the human aspect of lighting on the whole is very important to me. One of the reasons for that is the ability to promote social interaction. You can change the feel of a place with light. You can, in fact, change it from a place where people don’t want to be into a space where people are happy to come out and talk to other people, to socialise and interact. I originally wanted to be an architect, but when my faith in my drawing skills wavered I decided, instead, to take a course in Environmental Engineering. It concentrated more
on what happens inside buildings, how to make them work for the people who occupied them; it was, I suppose, creative problem-solving. At the end of that course, I had the chance to take a Ph.D in lighting, which was the start of my awareness of light and lighting and design, and I went straight from academia into a light and design consultancy.”

You are now very much involved in the Professional Lighting Designers Association.

“Yes. I originally joined PLDA because I really believe in the profession we work in and I liked the message that they were promoting – establishing the profession of lighting design with a big emphasis on education. Perhaps the best example of this is the week-long workshop we hold annually in the Swedish city of Alingsas. Sixty students are divided up among six designers from different backgrounds and together they work on a site chosen by the designer concerned. It is all about learning the concept process. The designer doesn’t make the design, but acts as mentor and helps them through the whole concept process, hopefully making sure they avoid making too many big mistakes. ”

“It was the experience of one of these workshops in Sweden that really inspired me to become even more involved with PLDA. I worked with 9 students in an apple orchard attached to a small house – essentially a private garden. On the first evening, I took them into the garden and had them test various fittings and look at some effects. I wanted them to understand that pointing light at things is not the same as a concept. While we were out there playing with our lights, a little girl came into the garden and started running through the beams of light. She was having a great time, laughing her head off. Some of the students took photos and one even made a video. ”

“We went back inside around midnight and I asked them what ideas they had. They started throwing suggestions around, but then I asked them to play back the video clip of the little girl enjoying herself and suggested that this could provide some inspiration. And things just went from there. They created a fairytale land for this little girl. It was incredibly conceptual. It was all about the harsh outside world and this fairytale world where the little girl could play.” I’ve seen photographs – it was pretty magical. ”

“Yes, it was. We also had a little trick up our sleeves: it was October, so the ground was covered with apples. We buried some fibre optics in the ground and stuffed them into apples, and they just glowed. It was just like a fairytale – and I think people saw it for the emotion that it had. “On that level, I see the emotion of light as something theatrically artistic. But you must also consider emotion in a social context. Somebody once told me how proud they were of a scheme they had just completed. It was really very simple – they had just improved the lighting along the edge of a run-down stretch of canal. But because of the lighting, mothers would now take their children down there, because it was a shortcut on their way home. The lighting had created a place where people would now go – whereas before they would not have dared. This is the power of light to transform things socially.It can, in a sense, be profoundly optimistic, because it actually makes a difference to people’s lives. ”

“Yes, but rather than a big emotional rush, you’re actually affecting them in a very small way. But it affects them every single day of their lives, because you’ve created a space that they now go into and have transformed an area that they would otherwise have avoided. I think that this social side of lighting is not being addressed to the full. ”

I suppose you actually have functional lighting – where you need to be able to see so that you don’t get mugged – and there’s a different kind of lighting where you try to create some kind of emotion. 

“It’s about promoting social interaction. You could take a space, for example, and simply put the same amount of light all over it, floodlight it like a football field and people would hurry through it. But you could also create areas of interest and pockets of intimacy where people can stop and sit and talk to each other. In such a situation, light does not exist by itself, but must be supported by a strong landscape concept, a strong architectural concept.”

Can you talk about a project you have done that illustrates this?

“We were recently involved in exterior lighting for a retail urban regeneration project in the centre of Exeter: a new block with retail spaces on the ground floor and residential and offices above. The space is actually active, because people live there and restaurants and bars stay open longer. It’s an occupied city centre. We brought our experience with similar projects to this one and a lot of what we did was building the lighting into the buildings and letting the light come out in a low-key soft way, and then having accentuated areas.”

So having the light coming up from the interior of the buildings and using that to light up the more public spaces.

“Yes. And this produces patterns of light, shadows and shapes, some of which are like a graphic design language. We have done that in a couple of schemes recently, using the light fittings to light the space and also using the lit feature as a graphical key. It not only accentuates the architecture, it also creates a rhythm in the space.
It is not bland uniformity. Under one of the canopies in Exeter you have what we call a bar code. We used simple linear fittings but we’ve adjusted the space between them so that it appears like a bar code. It lights up the street but when you look at it, you’ve got this interesting rhythm of light fittings that doesn’t really relate to the architectural rhythm of the building but adds interest to the view and draws your eye into the space.”

And is there a mood, an emotion, you are trying to achieve?

“I suppose we are trying to make things intriguing but in some cases also add a social contact. We want people to look and think about what is there so that it sticks in their minds but we also like to try and make sure people the people who ‘own’ the space understand the logic and have the knowledge of the concept that they can share. We’re also looking at using bar codes in another project we are currently developing. There is a Victorian stone viaduct which runs through the centre of Birmingham. We have developed a design based on bar codes – vertical lines of light and shadow. Rather than continuously lighting the viaduct, we have created a horizontal line of vertical lines. The spacing and colour of the lines is determined by translating a word into a bar code and we plan to collect the words from the local community. Each vertical bar code line is connected to an individual wind turbine, so that when the wind blows the bar code becomes brighter. It will make the viaduct come alive in different ways as the light reacts to the urban wind patterns. When a train passes, the turbulence will make the turbines spin faster and the bar codes will also respond kinetically to the passing of the train.”

So you’re not just lighting the viaduct, you are adding fun to it.

“Yes, we’re drawing attention to the viaduct and saying: take a new look at this amazing Victorian
engineering.”

You often talk of natural lighting design. Do you mean large windows?

“Designing for natural light is much more that just big windows. I think I can best illustrate that with another project – a school in Westminster. When we first met the architects we showed them some research on how daylight can improve the performance of students in schools and they reacted in a very positive way and daylight become a high priority for the project. However, designing for natural light is not a stand-alone activity – it is always a series of compromises with other environmental conditions. Big windows mean you lose more heat from the building in the winter and in the summer sunlight provides thermal gain, so it is a balancing act to get good daylight conditions. In this project we also influenced the roof design and suggested one that was completely glazed, but which has a series of vertical louvers which maximises the daylight coming in. It also allows sunlight at certain times of the day.

“For me sunlight is definitely the most emotionally charged type of light. Sunlight is happiness, don’t you think? When the darkness of night turns into day, there is a big evolutionary association with positive change. It’s morning, a new day. All that is so emotional in light is born out of evolution and ingrained within our psyche. If you ask me what the best type of light is, I would say natural light or firelight. Such primitive light generates strong emotional responses. Look at the great cathedrals or historic buildings: you walk in and the space is dramatically lit by shafts of sunlight through stained glass or even simply sunlight filtering through dusty windows. It’s an immediate emotional moment. The strength of the light is solidified by the dust particles in the
air and the reaction is always emotional.”