Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the podcast about Lighting Matters. Our unflinching conversations uncover the nuances and complexities which shape the craft of lighting design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: We explore the pivotal whys behind a lighting designer's choices and find honest answers to your most challenging lighting questions. Because lighting matters.
Welcome to the Lighting Matters podcast. I am one of your hosts, Lisa Reed with Reed Burkett Lighting Design.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: And I'm Avraham Moore. Avi with Morelight. And today we have the esteemed privilege of having Scott Rosenfeld on the podcast. Scott, you want to tell everybody a little bit about yourself and how you got into the awesome world of lighting design.
[00:00:50] Speaker C: Scott Rosenfeld, I work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery, literally Arts and crafts in Washington D.C. american arts and Crafts Smithsonian American Art is the largest collection of American art in the world. We share a building with Portrait Gallery, big old Parthenon looking building right in the middle of Washington D.C. third oldest building in D.C. after the White House and the Capitol. And it's great. We've got a broad collection of all kinds of things, all American art, all American artists. And across town in front of the White House, literally in the security zone of the white house at 1661 Pennsylvania Avenue, is a small museum called the Renwick Gallery. It's first museum in the country built to be a museum. It's literally we invented museums within this structure. And it's a museum of studio craft, things that are people making. It's about materials, wood, clay, ceramic, sculpture, textile, metals, glass. My job in both museums is that to help people see what these American artists and craftspeople are sharing with the public.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: As long as I've known you, you've been with the Smithsonian. How long ago did that start for you and how did you get there?
[00:02:03] Speaker C: So I started about 30 years ago and I was poached by another museum, actually the Museums of Asian Art, also a Smithsonian museum.
I worked under a guy named Richard Skinner for two years who is a very good lighting designer. And we lit Buddhas and Ganeshes and all matter of Asian Art, the nation's collection of Buddhas, literally. And before that I was at the Walters in Baltimore. I was a very younger person. I've been at the smithsonian for over 30 years and my degree is in theater. I spent, wow. From the time I was probably 14 years old till the time my youngest was born when I was in my mid to late 30s, so not quite 20 years lighting a theater and pointing lights at as many things as I could. I just became fascinated with lighting design, especially after graduating as an undergraduate, they kept on hiring me to do lighting. If they had hired me to do sets, maybe I would have done something else, but they hired me to do lighting, so I kept on doing it. I kept on getting better. Our local art museum was the Walters Art Museum, which is in downtown Baltimore, Maryland. I still live in Baltimore. And bizarrely, of all places, the Walters Art Museum, object for object, might be the best museum in the United states. They've got U.S. encyclopedia collection, which is very similar to the Metz, but its feature is that it's smaller and you can actually get through the thing, and the quality is extraordinary. The materials are things you can. I mean, I don't even if they belong in North America, because they're from Egypt and Greece and Rome and all of he collected from five continents in the 19th century when this material was available. So that's kind of a little bit of my DNA coming from the theater, where I learned how to tell stories with light and moving on and taking those skills, where I learned how to manipulate light, be able to tell stories with light, help people see, and apply that to museums and seeing things rather than people.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you remember that transition from theater to galleries? And what was that like? What was the hardest part about that transition?
[00:04:07] Speaker C: I don't know that it was hard. It was.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:09] Speaker C: Being young is hard.
Being in your early 20s and trying to find your way is a challenge. About the time that I realized, wait a minute, this is awesome. You know, I'd spent some time doing entertainment lighting, which was grueling, and the people were awful, that I got to get out of that world, especially in the early 90s world, which was, you know, I was much happier working in a museum environment in that era. And it was just fabulous, really. I got to sit there with my little lights and my little artworks that were worth tens of millions of dollars and. And help people see things that were not necessarily easy to see. I feel like one of my unfair advantages is that my mother took me to art museums as a child, and I was bored silly. I was born bored so much that it actually hurt. I hated art museums. So when I was a young person in college, I started going to them on my own, and I don't know why. It was a place that was normal to go. My mom normalized this as a place to go, and then I needed a job, and I had skills that I could apply to museums. And next thing I knew, I really kind of liked it, but I never forgot what it was like to be a bored kid. Just wanting to die.
And it inspired me to do everything I can to provide the most dynamic experience and make it as easy to see and experience what these artisans have to offer.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: I love that. I love how those experiences shape us and make us want to make life better for the next person. Those kinds of stories of things that happen to me as a young person and then, you know, so I strive to make it different for people. That's, that's amazing.
[00:06:03] Speaker C: And now when I bring my kids to museums, it's a, like a, it's. Can you do full contact museums? I literally get, you know, followed around by museum guards. It's like, you know, it's like sculpture. It's actually, you inhabit these spaces and there's no reason that we have to be, you know, be polite. And I'm very careful with the artworks. My job is to. Preservation is a huge part of my job. But I bring a joy in skipping through museums that I really love them now. And it's not these temples. I was giving a presentation and one of my favorite and non politic comments I ever got was that someone said that my photographs were like a well lit mausoleum because there were no people in my photographs for that particular presentation. And museums should not be a mausoleum. These are places that should have as much life and energy and joy as possible.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: So how do you connect that joy interest to your daily life of lighting pieces? How do you make that bridge?
[00:07:05] Speaker C: I think one of my unfair advantages is I get to work for an art museum and especially somebody who really does love art. That as much as what I bring to the art, it's, you know, it really is reciprocal. And it also I guess comes back to what we, what we learned in the theater, which is that our goal is to serve the material. And that if it's not serving the material, to cut it, get it out of the way and to do everything you can to serve the material just becomes, it's, it becomes its own little puzzle and its own little engine. And this, this thing that we're building in service of this very specific application. And I, my, my application is museums, it's art, but it really doesn't make a difference what application it is.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I, you, you said something that I think is important as an extension of what you're talking about is you get with light and I think uniquely with art, the opportunity to expose or hide things that you might not have seen some other way. I remember throwing some pretty unique light bulbs that I kind of wish I never knew existed on some Monet and the group all of a sudden was looking, and it's like, wow, look at. Look at the color there. There's. There's color that we haven't seen before. And of course, the lighting scientist in me is like, well, yeah, because incandescent light sources have no blue in them. But then being able to adjust that. Right. Like so. So I guess there's that piece, right? And those stories that are so fun, right, When. When you're talking to curators and such and. Oh, what? Wait, what's that? Wait, I don't. Right.
[00:08:47] Speaker C: Absolutely. And as much, I mean, you talked about there was a product that didn't. That worked and didn't work. It's. You know, I really think it's about the skill of the person on the ladder. I spent decades with incandescent lighting, and they worked great. I got to see really robustly. And I had that same experience. I was at the Phillips collection lighting the boating party at the Renoir, and they felt like they'd never seen the painting before, because I was the first lighting designer that really crafted the light in the entire environment and did everything we could to put the people in the place to see and experience what Renoir is offering. So the light on the canvas, the light on the frame, the light on the walls, the light on the floor, the light on the carpet, the light on the bench. How much light is reflecting on the ceiling? What does that reflected ceiling look like? The whole damn thing. And all the exhibit design and all the architecture and all of it to serve Renoir in that moment for those visitors. And on the lighting side, they hadn't had somebody that just crafted the light. I talk about a lot of what I do is handcrafted lighting. So it's. You know, it takes some little. So you get some good light bulbs or whatever, fixtures, luminaires. But to take every single luminaire that. It's got a very specific purpose. And then what is the size of that? The beam that's coming out of the luminaire? What is the spectral characteristics? What is its color? All of it. Within that, I can actually talk in a few different ways. I was there for the advent of LEDs, and what I never dreamed as a young theater person was I'd really be able to understand what it was about light that I really loved and allowed me. What was I bringing to these objects from an energetic point of view that was allowing me as a human being to see and experience. And when we got to LEDs, I was working. I got to Work with Naomi Miller and the whole team at Pacific Northwest National Labs, Michael Royer and Michael Poplarsky. And then I was driving up the street to NIST to talk to Wendy Davis and Yoshi Yono, and I got really. I mean, I was doing this LED conversion, but I got to be talking to, like, some of the most brilliant people in the United States, if not the planet, about what light is. And I got to understand deeply. And what I was surprised at was I brought something to the rest of the architectural community that I learned in the theater. So if you go Back to the 1930s, Stanley McCandless, one of the great teachers of lighting, along with separately, an artist named Thomas Wilfred, said that, hey, when we talk about light, and these were the first great electric light practitioners, we can talk about the intensity of light, the distribution of light, whether the light moves and it's dynamic, the spectral characteristics, largely the color back in the day, but now we think color rendering and everything else. And then all of those things about the light source are manipulatable. And what can we do with those lighting. Lighting attributes as lighting designers to help with the application at hand, whatever the application is, whether we're lighting a gas station, a medical examiner suite, hospitals, God, hospitals were actually healing people, churches and mosques and synagogues, and where people and other temples, where people were coming to have a spiritual moment, Everything, no matter what the application, how can we apply those things about the lighting source to the task at hand? And finally, I added to the list within the recommended practices that I've written for museums within ies, the angle of light, where does the designer choose to put the lights? So what is the lighting source with all of its characteristics? And then, you know, where do we put the lights?
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Right. Which does make a huge difference. It's. Can you talk about that a little bit? I know that it's easier to illustrate.
[00:12:36] Speaker C: With visuals, but absolutely. First of all, I mean, whether it's handcrafted, that we're actually taking a single spotlight and deciding how big it should be, I've got about 5,000 luminaires in my big museum, which is the Smithsonian American Art Museum. And I've got, I don't know, about 125,000 square feet or so. So if I think about that, I've got about 5,000 pixels. But these are pixels that I can change the size of each pixel and the color and the spectrum of each pixel. Well, at least some of them, about half of those 5,000. I've got some color tuning capabilities between 2,700 to 5,000 K, maybe 6,500 thereabouts. And the other half are just 4 degree luminaires. So the color tunable ones are at 19 millimeters. And those produce floodlights between 60 degrees and about 15 degrees or so. And then the 4 degrees are these wonderful little balls of light that, you know, it's from my normal throw distances of a few meters or about 15, 16ft. I end up with a beam of light a little bit bigger than the size of my hand. So all I have to do is make 5,000 choices. I've got 5,000 luminaires, and I just distribute those 5,000 luminaires. And you might end up with 10 lights on one painting or one. Some of it is a little game of Tetris that the object is. What did Reinhart say? That the object of light lighting design is to put the light where you want it and take it away where you don't. So, so much of what I'm doing is matching the size of the light to the size of the target, whether it's a painting or a wall or a floor. And then, you know, game's on. We're doing all kinds of things, but I'm largely because I'm using track lights. I run a department of track lighting. A lot of it's handcrafted that we've got a person up on a ladder actually manipulating and shaping each and every beam of light, angling the light, figuring out what the angle of incident is, either with filters or through multiple LEDs, choosing a spectrum and color rendering characteristics, whether it goes way beyond CRI or color rendering index. But really, how do we want to express the colorfulness of the world depending on the application.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: I love this concept of handcrafted light. I haven't really thought of it that way. It's one of many things I've been loving about the podcast is how people talk about light and their expression of light. And I think there's something really powerful in that, is that it is handcrafted, right? As you described, going up on the track and pointing it or whatever, but even to the detail of that hospital bed, right, with the two fixtures overhead or whatever it is, right. That was crafted in a way to produce that element and. And then to add the layer of controls that gives that patient that capability. There really is a.
I love it. There's just a handcrafting that we do that doesn't get talked about enough.
[00:15:33] Speaker C: I can't tell you that. It's such an honor to talk to the Two of you esteemed lighting designers. I was talking to another esteemed colleague who giving a tour of my museum. And it was a little bit impolitic, but I kind of loved it. She said, and she was a principal of a major lighting design firm. And she looked at me and she said, oh, you're a focuser.
And I was like. Which means that I was this person whose main job was to focus large banks of light. We used to call them lampas back in the day. And she wasn't saying that. And at first I was like, wow, I'd like to think of myself as a lighting designer. And then I'm like, well, I'm going to own it.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:13] Speaker C: So much of what I do is actually doing what is the hardest thing for a lighting designer to get onto the budget, which is to get a team of people up on a ladder that have skill to actually focus the damn rig. So the hardest thing to get people to pay for is what people are actually going to see, right?
[00:16:33] Speaker B: It makes the most impact, it makes the most difference. And it's the hardest thing to get in the budget.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: And I mean. And I would. I would expand it, with your permission, Scott, to final level setting, tweaking sensors. Lisa and I talked recently. I was in Atlanta closing out a project we were doing, and everyone said everything looked great, everything worked perfectly well. One, two different manufacturers shipped half of the color temperatures wrong. Just recently, somebody was yelling at morelights at our firm. You know, if you don't like it, then you should work it out. The manufacturer screwed it up. You supplied it, like, fix it. And prior to us going on site, everybody said it was fine. I mean, literally 3000k sitting next to 6500k in the same light fixture style. And that was okay.
[00:17:27] Speaker C: And did the client pay for contract administration services?
[00:17:30] Speaker A: Yes. Three days on site. That's it.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: But what does that mean? What does that mean when they don't see that it still has to matter? It still makes an impact, right? I mean, they told you it was all good, and then you got there and went, what is this? This is terrible.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: Right? And, you know, we walk into a bathroom and the lights don't turn on because the control system wasn't programmed. And then we left site and somebody was informing us that they were sitting in their office and the lights just turned off on them. So while there's the grand focuser, there's also the intensity, the level, the. The control, the. All these things. And that final, like, you know, in the architecture, you know, in the architectural World tour. The drywall isn't finished around that downlight. There's a hole right there. And nobody saw that. Nobody saw that there was, like a black space next to the white trim on the white drywall ceiling, ideally.
[00:18:32] Speaker C: So commissioning control systems. And how long should that period last for? Because it often takes people to actually use their building to figure out how that's really going to work out. So, I mean, I would advise people to extend that period. So, you know, at occupancy, there may be a period then six months and even a year later to come back, because that's about the time that people start putting tape over the occupancy sensors and doing all kinds of things to do workarounds because, you know, the lighting designer is long gone.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: Well, and I love your unique perspective, having worked in the same facility for a number of years, versus us, where we're popping in, you know, like you said, at the end of a project. And we do both have some clients that we go back to and work with for years, but it's different. You have a really special perspective.
[00:19:24] Speaker C: I was working with the Department of Energy. We got to do a gateway study. I don't know if you worked on the one at the Field Museum.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: I was on the side of it with Trig.
[00:19:32] Speaker C: So we got to do a robust one at American Art. It's a great paper. I wrote it up with Naomi Miller, and a couple years later, I forgot who it was. At doe, one of the people that run Piano, he comes to me and says we were a little skeptical of putting the investment of our time into museums, but what we didn't realize is that you really kick the shit out of our products and that you've. Because we have museums often. I mean, good museums have people on site manipulating the light and be responsible for lighting quality. We actually are one of the rare industries where there's a lighting person there day after day, seeing if the thing is actually working the way it's supposed to. And I've had a particularly blessed career that not only do I get to focus a lot of lights, and focusing lights is truly the best, because that's when I'm in the galleries working with the art, making decisions, telling the stories, but that I've actually got to design several lighting, custom lighting fixture runs that when you. When you buy 5,000 lighting fixtures, you get pretty much whatever you want. It's a large enough run. They'll just make it for you, and it's not increasing the cost dramatically. So being able to work with those Fixture manufacturers to build the bits and bobs that make it a good luminaire to work with has been just an amazing pleasure as well as early again in the LED world. About 2011, 2012, I was speaking at a DOE conference and an esteemed engineer, Ralph Tuttle, comes up to me and says, man, just tell me what you want. What duv? What is cct?
All the things. And he was spitting out all of these metrics. Some of them I've heard of, some of them I haven't. I realized even the ones that I'd heard of, I didn't know what exactly about the light I needed and I did not know how to answer his question. And then I went down and studied and it took a few years. And then learning the precursor to TM30 about really, how does spectrum work? How much do I really care about that versus the other things that lighting designers bring to the project? We know how bright the light should be, what are the distribution characteristics? What is going to work for this particular space? So much of our industry is driven by metrics and by these numbers which don't. It really depends whether they work or not with the thousand other things that lighting designers bring to these projects. While I could finally answer Ralph's question about what do I want in an led, a lot of it was a lot of it doesn't matter that much. A lot of it for me is about the size of the LED itself and how bright it is. So for a museum, I'm really interested in focused light. So having an LED with the color and spectrum characteristics that's really tiny and bright was very important to me. And then having you take these 19 millimeter egg yolks of LEDs that have some color capabilities and color tuning capabilities, and then how do you actually produce a luminaire that doesn't have color all over the place and doesn't start spreading color and field over angle issues, color over angle issues everywhere. And then actually working in the galleries and saying, wait a minute, maybe some of those color over angle issues are awesome. And it's providing texture and depth in a way that like a gobo pattern in the theater would or something else. And things that on paper would look terrible or when I just put them on a white wall looks terrible. When you actually get to a complex environment works in a way that I never dreamed possible. Always keeping my eyes open that things look awesome, they may not look the way that I imagined, they may look better. And to be open to the possibility that things could be better than I ever imagined. And that's the lovely mystery of what we do, that things can be better and the object of what we're doing is for them to be awesome. Not necessarily what we had in our mind's eye. Sometimes the two of them are the same, sometimes they're not. But typically things work out pretty well.
[00:23:30] Speaker B: What I'm hearing is the thing that I've always been a little envious of our friends in theater is that you get that really hands on. You get to put that up there and see what it does in real time. And you're not, you know, we're over here working on paper and maybe two years later it gets built and we get to see what it looks like. So, so you've, you've, in museums, you get to retain some of that, some of that hands on awesomeness that the theater has.
[00:23:59] Speaker C: And as you're choosing clients that if you can get some clients to get those focusing services in your contracts, you know, it's just, it's mutually beneficial to everyone. And I know many lighting designers that price their projects so they don't necessarily include it in a line item because they know if they don't include those services, the client's just not going to be as satisfied and they're not going to be as satisfied with their lighting design if they don't at least spend a few days in the air touching the lights.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: It's imperative. And the other thing that we do a lot of is early mock ups too. Right. For those same reasons. Let's see what this really does on this piece of art or even in this particular wall.
[00:24:43] Speaker C: And then creating the conditions with your other designers for things to take light textured walls, finishes on floors, all the things that you touch in the environment. And how does the whole multi sensory experience, from the way that your feet are touching the floor as you're walking across it to the reverberation of the room. The whole thing with light being a piece of it, trying to create this total experience.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: Yeah, there's definitely that connection of getting all the parties together, you know, and it's so interesting.
In our museum work, we've spent a lot of time with the exhibit designers and talking about graphics and graphic panels and graphic sizes, graphic colors, pigments, inks, graphics, whatever they're going to do and then saying, stop looking at it on your computer screen, like you need to get a sample and here's a light which lights, you know, try. You have to look at things and really experiment in real as opposed to like, oh, it looks Fine. On the screen, it's going to be printed different, it's going to be presented differently, it's going to be surrounded by different materiality. And again, like you said, Scott, like that multidisciplinary, you know, the feel of the floor with the type, I mean like different pairs of shoes make different sounds on different floors with, you know, different finishes in different spaces. Or the, you know, the age old museum question. Black ceiling or white ceiling. Right. Or maybe no ceiling. Right. And how does that play in to everything? And, and, and, and yeah, it's just, it's very fun. It, it becomes, it becomes challenging at the same time because you know, even with track systems you're, you have that limitation. Right. The track is this way. There's sometimes ways around that, but there's still that challenge that exists there. And it's getting everybody together. Right. And have the conversation.
[00:26:50] Speaker C: Oh, and the collaboration is the best with other lighting designers. Absolutely. With curators, exhibit designers. That we are the rare sense. If there's five senses, we're the only sense that gets their own design profession and a lot of the other disciplines, architects and exhibit designers are carrying the weight of those others. But because we are actually here for a single sense, we can also speak up especially for a diverse community of people with different visual abilities. Working with. I did a little bit of work with the Institute for Human Centered Design out of Boston and they're just great. And it was, it supercharged my design practice because being able to meet the needs of the extreme user is a basic principle of design that if you're developing a game, if the novice and the gamer are both happy, everyone in the middle will be as well. So if I can meet the needs of a low vision community and the connoisseur, the folks in the middle will be fine. So designing for those edges is a design hack which is extraordinarily effective. And design human spaces when we're talking about. At the beginning I said to talk about seeing the art and experiencing the art. Howard Branston, I got to meet and he signed his book A Matter of Light. And he made it very clear in his little inscription that museums are human experiences. So we can see not only the things, but perhaps each other. So we have a community experience coming to these community places. And the book itself, he was asking the basic question, what do you want to see? And I love that as just a basic grounding, as a starting place for light and design. What do you want to see? And I extend that to how do you want to see what kind of experience do you want to have? What do you want to feel as you're walking through these and within museums? But I think it could be applied to almost any interior space it can.
[00:28:43] Speaker B: And I mean, you've referred to different superpowers that you have, but just lighting, being able to craft with lighting is a superpower. We have a spiritual impact on people physically, how they experience space. There's just.
[00:28:58] Speaker C: It's.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: It's powerful.
[00:29:00] Speaker C: It's.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: It really is.
[00:29:01] Speaker C: And I never dreamed the 21st century would be so amazing. I knew that we would have to save energy. I knew that the amount of. I was. I was at 5 watts per square foot. It was crazy. It was like there was no way that we. That it was going to be sustainable to use that quantity of energy in museums into the future. And that we've managed to reduce now. I'm well under 1 watt per square foot. We have reduced our energy load by about 75, 80% and increased the quality.
[00:29:27] Speaker B: That's what I was going to say. Yeah.
[00:29:28] Speaker C: And that's just what's crazy, that I've got more control.
[00:29:31] Speaker B: It's a better experience.
[00:29:31] Speaker C: It's a better experience. And we recently did a major renovation of both the Portrait Gallery and American Art. Alex Cooper, the Portrait Gallery's lighting designer, led the data project as far as developing some new robust control systems. And now I'm sitting in the galleries and I can actually work like I used to in the theater, where on the ladder, we're handcrafting the shape and the size of the light, but we're sitting at computers on the floor, controlling the intensity and some of the spectrum. And we're doing that all on the floor. And it provides. It's better. It's just better than anything we could do. One screen, we used to use, literally, window screen. And I still use window screens, some of my museums, to very slowly dim out the lights. That means that if I want, say, what we call them wall washers, that light just the walls, I have to go to every single luminaire, take off the little front, put it in a screen in iterations. It is so time consuming. Now I can take those groups of light, do it at a computer, and it just works really beautifully.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: What I find interesting, and I think people miss, is it's the combination of getting up on that ladder and crafting the light, then stepping down and looking at it and adjusting intensity, adjusting your spectrum, making other adjustments, and then you might have to go back up and adjust and the two of them directly play with one Another in such a unique way that you can't describe without seeing it.
[00:31:01] Speaker C: What you need is a lighting designer.
I mean it becomes truly complicated and then you actually also need other engineers when we. So we've got a very complicated implementation of Bluetooth low energy lighting that actually requires both myself and another full time person as a full time systems integrator on board at the museum to keep this thing running. There are other implementations that are much simpler to deploy and allow some of it. But the most robust installations of this is bidirectional communication. Each fixture is communicating back to its gateway. We're getting about a million packets of information flowing back and forth every minute or two into a database. Information that we can collect, graph sensor data that we can graph. We're well into the realm of big data with what we're doing at the Smithsonian and these truly next generation 21st century lighting systems. It's a really exciting time. But it takes people. It takes skilled people on the ladder. It takes skilled people at the computer querying databases, keeping this thing running day after day after day, 24 hours a day. 365 within this project. It meant that I am now responsible for seven days a week of operation, 24 hours a day because there's no other team sophisticated enough to do it. It means that now part of my job, I'm a lighting designer. I'm there to make things look pretty. But now I'm also an IT professional and I know networking and data and all the other things because I'm able to finally use LEDs as the inherently digital device that they are. Around 2015 or so I did the Renwick Gallery and I put screw in light bulbs because at that time we weren't sophisticated enough to do the full robust implementation of LEDs. And I'm so excited that at American Art and Portrait Gallery we can really do a case study of if you can do anything with light, what do you want to do and how can you bring that to the built environment.
[00:32:59] Speaker A: Museums you bring up. Another good point is that we as lighting designers have expanded beyond light and control. You know, now controls it.
And Lisa and I have talked a lot about it that more lights. We've also now have a maintenance department. Like we're helping our customers maintain these installations because our clients don't have Scots in them. Right? Like you need somebody who really has the knowledge to maintain the light, but also who to call troubleshooting technical, blah blah, you know, all these different layers and all the controls associated with it, reprogramming, addressing Yada yada. And I think that the lighting design community is going to have to start embracing some of that long term maintenance support because we, we want successful jobs. Right? We're, we're using technology that should last longer than anything we've used before and it seems to be lasting longer and longer and longer. But as it lasts longer, there are onesie twosies that need assistance and tweaking. And I don't think we should be asking a small museum institution, a small office tenant build out or something like that to maintain that.
[00:34:24] Speaker C: That sounds absolutely right. That first of all gearing the level of technology to the level of sophistication that can maintain it. I'm so excited to hear that you're providing those services. First of all, we're in the age of LED, and you said it, which is LEDs are going to last a long time. It's not like incandescent lighting that's going to blow out every six months. These LEDs will do what they're doing day after day for years on end, which makes it more practical to do the kind of work that you're suggesting and provide those services. And we're still, we're just beginning to figure it out as an industry. I'm excited that you're providing those services. I know that some of the manufacturers are stepping up and providing some of those services in house, if not the manufacturer's reps that are more local. There's a whole band of systems integrators that are getting on board that are providing those services locally. Some of them are theatrical based, some of them are springing up on the architectural side. And it's a super exciting time to figure out how we're doing this thing. One of my questions for you though is at the specification side. I don't know a lot of lighting designers that want to engage with the complexity of providing light robust specifications for those control systems. I think that is undertapped. While there is there are folks out there that'll do the construction and post construction well, there's some people that'll do the construction side. Some of them even do it well. And it's hard and a lot of people don't do it well. And it's a mess. And they're really best, they're well off paying for those commission and post commissioning services because so many of these control systems don't work well at construction. But on the pre construction side, developing those contract documents, where do people go? Where, where do it sounds like, do you, you know what firms are Providing those lighting control services so people can build well once they get the contract.
[00:36:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I think Lisa and I have talked to a number of different lighting designers. I didn't mean to step on top of you, Lisa, but you know, for more lights, and we've talked about this, that light we will not do a job that we don't design the lighting control system and we design open protocol lighting control systems that use either DALI or dmx and we don't care who the control system manufacturer is beyond those protocols. So we design it construction wise very. And pre construction wise very open. So our customers have lots of opportunities, the manufacturers have lots of opportunities and ways to provide it. But it's not a single manufactured design because every manufacturer is different. That's the way we do it in the US like outside of the US you can kind of put some pieces together and make a control system and it might work. But in the US we buy manufacturer A, B, C, D, E, F, G's lighting control system and they all work a little bit different. So our belief is that you have to design it that works for everybody. And then when you are in construction and the contractor has picked something, you refine the use case with the owner and that particular manufacturer. But there's not a lot of lighting designers doing it that way. And I would, I would argue that. And, and people are welcome to, you know, comment as appropriate to this podcast. I'd be willing to bet that probably 95% of the lighting design firms don't design lighting controls or they charge extra for it.
[00:37:51] Speaker C: That sounds about right to me. So very excited that we're about to come out with the latest version of the IES Recommended practice for museum lighting. Super proud of this document. This is the third revision that I've worked on. The first genesis of it was back in the 90s and there's just one of the things that we this latest version has a new lighting control section that's associated with it to give some people ideas about how do we do this work. As we're working on that document, I was amazed how few lighting designers wanted to engage in lighting controls. So to hear that it's a requirement of yours makes sense to me because if the lights don't turn on, you're probably going to get blamed for it anyway. So you might as well have control over it and that you've got strong opinions about how to do that, with strong opinions about interoperability, about that there'll be a team of people in each city prepared to deal with whatever technology that you have that a company can fold and that there'll be other people that can actually provide that material. I remember the famous, you know, school in New York that couldn't turn their lights on because there was one component that just wasn't available.
[00:39:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:39:02] Speaker C: And that you're, that you're, you're, you're, you're protecting your clients from that kind of thing. I think there's other ways that you can do it. But I understand why you've made your choices. I mean, I personally think that lighting designers should step up and bring on the controls people because I honestly don't know who else would be better prepared to do this work. Back in the day, we used to, you could hire a systems integration, you could ask a systems integration firm and they would provide really strong boilerplate specs that made sure that either them or someone at their level would get the job. And that was, and many, you know, manufacturers reps will still provide some of those services. We can do better. I think we can do better than that.
[00:39:43] Speaker B: Well, yeah, that's, that's what I've found it. It we find ourselves sort of wrestling for the control scope with the electrical engineer. But for the most part, the engineers are then leaning on the manufacturer's reps to do the work. So we work to get control over that.
[00:39:59] Speaker C: And I know a few extraordinary electrical engineers, but most of them, I mean they're engineers, they're not designers, so they're not. Their training and their background is not to listen to what the client wants people to feel.
And then how do you actually develop and then how do you actually develop the conditions to make that happen? And especially with controls. Where was it Stephen Krug, most family said don't make me think was his secret for controls that you want controls from the end user's point of view should be super dead simple and just intuitive to use like your phone or any other application. It just should. You should be able to look at it and figure it out without any instruction. Now what it takes to actually make it that simple is a whole layer of complexity that at Smithsonian we have people dedicated. I've got a full time person dedicated to the background complexity so our end users can do their own programming. So people at Smithsonian with the lighting control system that we've developed here, schedule their own lights. They turn their lights on and off. Because while I may be responsible seven days a week, 24 hours a day, I don't want to be the guy. I want there to be a distributed team of People that, the people that are running the events, the people that are cleaning the galleries. There's a whole bunch of people that can touch the lighting controls. It doesn't have to be me. Even though we are responsible for that whole back end system.
[00:41:22] Speaker B: Well, it has to be crafted. Just like we were talking at the beginning of the podcast about the lighting being crafted. The controls have to be crafted and designed and not everybody wants to put that level of effort into them. So that's. The lighting designers are the people for it.
[00:41:36] Speaker C: And maintained.
[00:41:37] Speaker A: Yes, and maintained. Right. Yeah. I mean, you think about that keypad and it just says 1234.
What's that?
Rachel and I stayed in a very nice hotel downtown. And you walk in and it said entertain. And I was like, there's a king bed.
What am I entertaining in this hotel room?
You know, can you explain what entertain?
And, and I remember pushing the button.
[00:42:11] Speaker B: And being like, is it watching television?
[00:42:14] Speaker A: I don't even think that is what I would do for entertain. Right. Like, so it was just, it was very odd. And I, and I actually did some digging and learned that that is a standard button from this manufacturer. So they didn't do any like custom engraving, brand centric anything. It was, oh, we're going to take this button and do something to it.
[00:42:40] Speaker C: So they ordered hundreds or thousands of these buttons and just left them at the default.
[00:42:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I. And the worst part of this is that you go into the bathroom and all you want is like a low glow. Right. To be able to use the toilet. There was no way to do that. All this lighting control, all this capability in this hotel room and you know, upgraded, this happened to be a suite thing anyway. But you couldn't put on a low level of illumination to use the restroom.
[00:43:13] Speaker C: So we found that in museums there's a huge distance between being able to do anything and actually being able to do anything. So there's famous, there's lots of museum examples where they've got full granular control over every single luminaire. But without the organization and the software to be able to control barely anything. So just turning one lights in a room or the entire museum, that becomes a huge struggle because, and this is one of, I think, the advantages of coming out of the theater, so much of theatrical lighting is learning how to organize the lights into schedules, circuit schedules, lighting fixture schedules. We have ported that at the Smithsonian and we're actually using for our organizational system, for our control system, our CAD programs. So our CAD program becomes a front end to our lighting control system. We export out of our lighting control out of our CAD program a simple CSV with XY floor data plus a little bit more, say some grouping and purpose and other information. All of that, because all of that is associated with an icon on a graphic user interface. So I've literally got a hospital cart with two screens or three screens. One has my CAD program, one has my graphic user interface, which is my control system. They are identical except one I can click on and change the attributes of the light. I can make it brighter, dimmer, change the color, do whatever but the front end. So when I, and I can actually, I can, I can move the fixtures on my control system, but I don't because then I get chaos, right? I do all of my organization on my CAD program. And then now I've got lists, I've got searchable lists, I've got a database. I can actually find those luminaires. And that has been something that computers have had the capability to do for 30 or 40 years. As long as Excel was. Excel is.
But people didn't do it. And I have no idea, you know, so that's, that's again why it's an exciting time that we're, we've got these digital technologies and it's just a matter of doing the implementation. And I do think it requires design and thinking about how people are using the space. One of the coolest talks I ever heard was Barry Darrigan. Was that her name?
[00:45:24] Speaker A: Derry Berrigan? Yes.
[00:45:25] Speaker C: So she was talking about lighting McDonald's. Yes, I just, I mentioned and that. Have you heard this? So in order to learn how to light this fast food restaurant, she worked every job in the restaurant, every shift. So it took like a week or two of working in this fast food restaurant, McDonald's to be able to just be able to know what the rhythm of the place was. So you know, when you walk into the, when you walk into McDonald's, you can see the back at the backstage. To be able to know what those people needed in order to see, to do their jobs, to be able to inhabit that space. I learned more about design and then that she took that and ported it to education and working at a community college or so, asking those students how they wanted to experience their educational environments and then giving them tools to actually have agency in their environment. Super inspirational and exciting.
[00:46:17] Speaker A: I have spent quite a bit of time with Dari. She has this design aesthetic and this design deep thinking. It's amazing. It's absolutely incredible.
[00:46:30] Speaker C: And does it all start by putting yourself in the Space that you're occupying.
[00:46:35] Speaker A: 100%, that's so simple. And sometimes you have to do that with your brain. Right. It's a space that doesn't exist with your mind.
And go to a place of inspirational thought, right. Like on a deep dimension. Right. That you then are standing in the space that doesn't exist and thinking about all the materiality and the finishes and the feel and all that, and what it'll feel like when it's done. And what are the design choices to be made to connect all those pieces together?
[00:47:10] Speaker C: Absolutely right.
This past summer, we did a large museum conference with the Illuminating Engineering Society, and I had invited Andy Pekarek and James. Oh, I forgot James's last name. To talk about a model that he built for museums. Because what you just described makes 100% of sense to me. But there's a whole diverse community of people that it may or may not make sense to. They may be interested in something very different. So this team developed. They're asking the questions, when people come to a museum, how are they experiencing the museum? And he developed actually a robust framework. What they did, where they tested a bunch of people and asked a bunch of people questions, and then they actually graded it a little bit like the Myers Briggs. And they found that there's four main types of people, and some people are interested in everything, but most people are only interested in one or two of these four things. And he called it ipop, that when people come to museums, they're interested in ideas about the place. And IPOP itself is an idea. So that. That. That is interesting. So it could be about democracy, it could be about beauty, it could be about certain types of art movements, whether it's Impressionism or Expressionism. Those are ideas. Ipop. So it's about people and actually about. Is. Is there a person in this, in this, say, an art museum? Is there a person in. In the picture? Who made it? Why did they make it? What about. What about it? The object, the materiality, how did the person make it? The craftspersonship, how were these things joined together? How did they use the paint? Whatever it is, the materiality, the object. So where I pop. So we're at ideas, people, objects, P. The last P is for physical. And that's a physical response to the thing, to the objects, to the space. And you're actually feeling it in your body and moving and moving through the space with your body. Sports is a pure physical experience, or largely pure. There's ideas and all kinds of things. So you can actually start applying this to a lot of our different tasks. But what I love most about it is it doesn't assume that everybody is interested in the same things. It starts breaking it down and saying, okay, especially as designers, we sit down with a client and very quickly we have to start sizing them up. What are they interested in? Are they interested in micro information, macro information? How are we going to do this thing? And for museum people, if I'm talking to a curator, a lot of them are very strong on the ideas front and they are all about the ideas. They're about the narrative and a story. They may be interested in the materiality and the object. Some of them interested in the people. And a smaller subset are looking at the pure sensory, physical experience.
Some people are even all the way across. I think the mathematics that they worked out was about 50% of the people were strongly at a strong preference for 1. A smaller, about 40% had a preference for 2, and then a much smaller subset for 3 and 4 of the IPOP. So a lot, you know, they. People have a strong, strong proclivity for one of them. There's one more thing about this. Because people are ideas people doesn't mean they don't have access to the other ones. In fact, when you have those mind expanding, mind blowing experiences, it's because you have been opened to something that you're not naturally isn't your natural preference, but you become open to. Wow. I go to an amusement park and I get on a ride and I have this physical experience. And it is particularly mind blowing for people where that is not their singular jam. And they're open to experiences that may not be their first entry point.
[00:50:37] Speaker B: That's kind of mind blowing. I'm gonna spend some time with that. That's amazing. And I'm thinking about experiences that I've had. You know, just my first visit to the Guggenheim in New York was that kind of. And it was. Yeah, it was a combination of being in this place that I had read about and seen in pictures. And then I was looking at a particular piece of art by Van Gogh that was, was painted on, I think it was cardboard. And like I was moved by the thought of what was going on in his life. Yeah, it was this. It was like this combination of all of those things happening to me at once and like tears. And it was amazing.
[00:51:16] Speaker C: And to serve a diverse audience because, because somebody's interested in ideas, you actually want to hit all of the marks within everything we do. I mean, so we can communicate to the broadest range of people no matter where they're coming from and what they're, what they're, what their experiences are and what they are needing from the thing that they're experiencing.
[00:51:35] Speaker A: There's a lot here that I want to digest a little bit further.
I hope the audience really enjoyed and is like doing the research as well. Scott, before we go, you had mentioned one of your favorite podcasts that you wanted to recommend, and I just wanted to get it on the record because I'm, I'm excited to go listen to this now.
[00:52:00] Speaker C: So it's called Design Matters. It's hosted by Deborah Millman. She's been doing it for decades now. And when I was giving my first presentations, which were really design oriented and I got to talk about design, I felt that I was a good designer, but I hadn't talked about design. I come out of the theater and museums and I've been doing this thing for years. And she gave me a vocabulary and a confidence to talk about design as more of a pure thing. She started by interviewing the best graphic designers. She's a graph. Deborah Millman's a graphic designer. So Milton Glaser, who's like one of the most famous graphic designers that has ever lived, was her first interview. And then she just went on from there and all the notable graphic designers, industrial designers, anybody that she wanted to talk to. And then she grew into talking about CEOs and really how do we do all of the things that we do within our design community and it's called Design Matters and can't recommend it enough.
[00:52:53] Speaker A: Well, we'll be, be sure to include a link in the show notes for folks who want to check it out. And Scott, I really appreciate you taking a little time out of your day to join us and talk about how much Lighting Matters and all the different directions that light and you've, you've taken. I'm. There's so much here I'm like kind of spinning with all these things that kind of like pull from and, and do some more analysis. I'm very excited. This is such a great conversation.
[00:53:25] Speaker B: I'm inspired and I hope that our listeners are too. Thank you so much, Scott.
[00:53:30] Speaker C: Pleasure is absolutely mine. Thank you. Thanks for providing this forum.
[00:53:34] Speaker B: Lighting Matters. As we wrap up, we want to reiterate how much we value your time and we hope you found it as much fun to listen to as we had creating it. Remember to like it and share this content with your friends and colleagues.
[00:53:50] Speaker A: The opinions expressed are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the sponsors Our content has general application, but we recommend obtaining personalized guidance from a professional IALD lighting designer such as RBLD or morelights for your next endeavor.
