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'm so excited about the conversation we're going to be having today. My name is Lisa Reed. I'm with Reed Birkitt Lighting design in St. Louis, and I'm here with Avi.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: Hi, everybody. Avi Moore with more lights in Chicago. And we have our special guest today, Thomas Patterson with Lux Populi. Welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:54] Speaker C: Thank you very much.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: And our sponsor today is us, brought to you by us because us is awesome.
[00:01:05] Speaker C: I think we need to do endorsements for ourselves now, don't we?
[00:01:09] Speaker B: I think we should absolutely. Do we need to endorse each other or.
[00:01:16] Speaker C: I don't know.
Let's do a circle endorsement. Lisa, in your capacity, in your last company or your assembled company that has come together over the last few years, I have to tell you that the goodwill going out there is phenomenal. I had a project maybe a decade ago to light some cranes in Miami. It was a feasibility study. Alas, it didn't happen. But they were putting in these giant new cranes. They're post super Panamax cranes, because, you know, how many superlatives can you add into one name? And they wanted them to be lit to look like flamingos, of course. And these things are vast. I mean, vast. And until you actually stand at the bottom one or better climb up one, you have no idea how big they are and how thin all the elements are. So we were doing a big study, of course. Do you trace it with. At the time, neon or led was an option, but it was equal options. Or do you graze it with light or all those sorts of things. It's like, who do you call to get advice on that? And I called Randy, and he put me together with a couple of your people, and they said, okay, tell us what you're planning. And I talked through everything that I had in mind for how to solve this problem and how you test it and validate it, and how you deal with things like, it's not painted the right color yet. So how do you deal with reflectance issues? And, you know, you're talking about two and a half degree beams. So you're talking about really narrow, multi hundred thousand lumen luminaires. And yes, very few people have lit something like this in Lewis Arch or a piece like that. So, you know, I talked through what I had in mind, and we validated what I had in mind. There are some nips and tucks, but I think that's the generosity and warmth of this industry. Wherever, you know, someone can help you out with another contract. So, you know, the sort of assembled team that you're. That you lead has taken fantastic care of me over the years, and it's greatly appreciated. How's that for an endorsement?
Are we bringing it together by us?
[00:03:08] Speaker B: I'm so touched.
[00:03:10] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: I love that. And I can pass that along because Avi recently recommended us for a project that was outside of the school scope of work that his company usually deals in. And I'm just so grateful for that. Sharing of information, sharing of potential projects and clients. I think it's really important, or maybe not important. It's just really rare to find an industry where we all really do care for each other so much. Even though we're competitors. And I've heard outsiders say the same, they've never seen anything like it. And we all like to think we're special. Right?
[00:03:50] Speaker C: That's what I tell my kids. We're all special, just like everybody else.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: But, yeah, I mean, Avi and his team did a fantastic presentation at the IES conference on Dolly, and they have so much expertise in that. I wouldn't touch a Dolly project without talking to more lights.
[00:04:09] Speaker C: Totally agreed.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Thanks. Yeah, you know, we try.
Well, and Thomas, you and I connected on kind one of the topics that we want to discuss today is just the industry as a whole. And, you know, our organization, connections and things. But I want to second what Lisa said, and Thomas, what you said, too, is that the community of lighting designers, I think, is happy when another lighting designer gets the job.
[00:04:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: Right. I love my local lighting designers. I love my not so local lighting designers who play in our playgrounds. Right. And it's all about having good design for the customer, for the client. And if there's a lighting designer, and the way I usually say it is, as long as there's an Iald lighting designer, although that may be changing based on. Anyway, different topic, you know, it gets better. And I think, Thomas, you have been very vocal in that, and I love that, about where we have ultimately connected in that change. And we also have chatted a lot about controls and your passion for controls and commissioning and things like that. And I talk a lot about that. There are control manufacturers who have dumbed the specification community for their benefit. And there are folks like your team that have gotten beyond it like our team. Right. Like Lisa, you mentioned that it's like it's understanding. That's the thing that makes it work and tweaking and making it perfect.
[00:05:59] Speaker C: Yeah. I think we're in a situation at the moment where you're going to have to do a lot of rethinking about how the whole controls world and the whole purchasing world is done and how education is done for lighting designers. I think what you're referring to to some extent, and the conversations go way beyond it, is a spat that I, group of my friends and I instigated with Lutron simply because they were using commercial power to force people into the time, their ecosystem system for homes and so on, which was not in the interests of our clients. And our job is to advocate for our clients, not to advocate for manufacturers.
And to be able to deal with that, you have to have a wider set of knowledge than what manufacturers are feeding you. And you have to not be buying through manufacturers or their reps and so on. You have to have other ways of putting pressure on the markets. And sometimes it requires the odd powerful article in the right place to get people on stage to talk about what they need to talk about. And I think as a community, that's one of the things we're not doing enough of, actually. I mean, I think my conversations with you, Avi, are really worth talking about. I was talking to Stephen Rose in one of your circle, too, just the other day. And in some ways, my role is nothing. I'm not the quiet committee person. I appreciate the quiet committee people, the people who make these organizations work. To some extent, my role is the first member in from the SWAT team throwing the flashbang grenade through the window and letting some other people bring some order to it.
But as an industry, it's nice to be nice, and it's nice that we all like each other. But I think we are, to some extent, being, to get along, to go along, being positive about things. And we need to be looking at things like controls and supply paths and markups and roles of reps and distributors in the industry and all this sort of stuff, because at the moment, we're not taking enough care of our, we're not taking enough care of our clients if we're not really pressuring those paths.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: Well. And I wonder if there is a part of this also to the Un client, and there is this calling out of bad design, poor design, mistakes with design. As we were getting started today, I was talking, Lisa, a little bit about, my oldest kid is five, just started kindergarten. And at the IES conference recently, there was a lot of discussion about Flickr and tea led lamps getting put into classrooms. And I don't have all the research, so I don't want to go the wrong place. But doe is doing a lot right now on that. And, you know, I'm very sensitive. I don't think I'm as sensitive as Naomi Miller. But, you know, there is stuff coming out about migraines and all this other stuff and, you know, I just do my simple test and last night was curriculum night. And if I would have been in that classroom another ten minutes, my dinner would have been on the floor.
[00:08:58] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: And this is kindergarten. I mean, they're going to be in that school for four years, then they're going to go to the next school that's in that district. And, you know, I'm sorry for those listening who may know exactly the district I'm in, but I've offered this district to do things for free, like brought an electrician, brought manufacturers.
Let's do all the first grade classrooms. My wife teaches in the district too. And no, no, no, maintenance has got it. We're all over it.
[00:09:32] Speaker C: I attended the IES research conference this year, which was fantastic. There's some really interesting speakers there. And PNNL let us ingest and they showed us their studies on t leads. And I'm going to get the statistics wrong, but it was of the order of two dozen tled tubes they'd tested, and I think one passed the flicker test. Out of all of them, it might have been two or three, but it was, you know, it was de minimis, it was, you know, it was irrelevant. We're seeing that everywhere. We've just started a project.
Each of our officers does a pro bono project each year.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: I.
[00:10:04] Speaker C: And this year we're designing a hospital in Kenya. And the total build budget, so the grey construction budget, so meaning concrete and block and so on, is $600,000. The total budget to get this hospital open, excluding the x ray machine and the CAT scanner, is $1.5 million for 100 some beds. So, you know, my budget for lighting is going to be challenging, to say the least. And we've said, well, we need to do a minimal number of light sources. They need to be something which can be preordered in quantity with spares, because we don't think we can use t leads. Because even amongst the tea leads that PNNL tested and found good, they tested the same manufacturer's panels a year ago and then this year, the same panel they put back in for testing and it failed. And I seem to recall that's a capacitor failure. So it's an inevitability that some percentage of capacitors will fail if you've got problematic capacitors. So, you know, on a sample set of one, you shouldn't be getting 100% failure rate. So we're not doing tea leads in this hospital. And we said, what's our best option? So lED panel two x two s, highest lumens per cent, or lowest cost per lumen of any light source on the market. We can get them for under $20 there and we'll do all the due diligence on the drivers for that, because that's to your point, that's where the flicker action is. And then we're going to use Gu tena, Mr. 16s for all the accent lights, which will just be surface mounted junction boxes with lamp bases. And then in some decoratives, which there are decoratives, we're trying to make a, well, environment as best we can. On the smell of an oily rag. We are going to be using screw and a lamps which we can validate. I mean, that's actually one of the better validated parts of the market because there are a certain number of reputable manufacturers who are actually testing that, unlike almost everything else. And then finally we're doing some plug in night lights, which may even be kitty pattern, you know, little fairies and so on. Because what that lets us do is it lets us have hard wire is only two x two s. Screw in is only from one type of box of one type of replacement, a lamp. Gu ten is only task lighting in medically active areas. And the little plugins only go into the receptacles, where there's a receptacle below the bedhead to be able to do night lighting, for kids to be able to get out of bed in hospital and be safe. All those micro little touches that, that really matter. But the single biggest task, the thing which is going to cost us more hours than the lighting design or anything else, we think is going to be flicker validation on the whole thing. And that's insane. I mean, we've just gone back to 1984, right? Exactly. Not in the orwellian sense, but that was when.
That's when t twelve ceased to be current technology.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: So, I mean, I love that story. And you're just taking us through your process there because there's a perception, or we get accused all the time as lighting designers of gold plating a design. And it's not that we're just taking care of the things that are important. And even in this project, with no budget, you can take care of the key needs for lighting in that space.
[00:13:13] Speaker C: Is that true? I mean, I certainly think there are some people who really do focus on all of these things, but I think there's a perception in the market, in our architects and so on, and clients not without a fair bit of backup, that a lot of designs are not being given the thorough thinking that we need to. Actually, it's one of the things I'm really concerned about in our industry is that people are racing through, not getting enough training, not getting enough formation, not doing broad enough thinking, and you get all sorts of lighting designers. And to be clear, there's a lot of people out there I really respect. So this is not me trashing everyone. This is more a concern about the general market and where we're at. We're seeing too much lighting designed by numbers. Oh, it's a textured wall. We uplight it.
The sort of things where there's a formulaic approach or where there's a decision to do something because it's exciting for the lighting designer to do it, rather than because it's what's needed. And, you know, this is not necessarily the independent lighting designers. I'm not going to use word ild lighting designers, for reasons we can discuss later.
It's too many lighting design practices are racing through design too fast, and doing design which is not serving their clients interests or not serving their clients full interests.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: Why is that happening?
[00:14:26] Speaker C: Look, I think some of it is financial pressures. I have the luxury of being based here in Mexico City. The cost of rent under one of these chairs that I'm sitting on is substantially less than the cost of rent for people with an office in New York City. So I'm aware that I have that luxury. I think a huge amount of formation. We practice what we call first principles, lighting design, which says that when a project comes in, you look at all the purposes and effects of lighting in the project and all the stakeholders who are going to be affected by it, and then you look at the principles of what light can do for you and see what is possible. An example might be in a retail environment. We did a project which we consider a failure for obvious reasons. I won't name the brand, but a brand came to us who dollar 20 to dollar 30. Fashion, what they call four ounce fashion. You know, the weight of the fabric is pretty minimal. And we worked with a great design practice to do a design for it. And we tried to make it, you know, really glam in the middle. And then around the perimeter, we tried to make it look as much like a target as possible. You know, decent fluorescent troughers all the way around the perimeter to make all the elevations look well lit and all the merchandise be well lit. But that clue, that looks like what target did so well ten years ago. And we then sat outside and once it opened, we sat outside and watched who went in. And it was a bunch of beautifully dressed women going in and looking at the fabric and touching it and going, it's not my thing. I'm walking back out. Because the centre glamour section was drawing them in. But then when they saw the actual product, it disappointed them. And then the young women who are their target market, which would be upper working class, lower lower middle class women, typically people in service jobs, receptionists and so on, as the target market of this client. A lot of them were still going in, but less than we expected. A lot of them were just walking straight past because it looked like it was outside of their budget. And that's a failure of first principles, lighting design. Right. That's a failure to correctly calibrate to the communication role of lighting. We had done beautiful lighting design. It was gorgeous. But did it serve our clients interests? Now, the client still thinks it was a success to a large extent, but that's because they were renovating a store which was 20 years old, so anything was going to look better and perform better. Their turnover dramatically increased with the renovation. But the reality is that as a design to then roll out, we actually had to pull it back, reduce the amount of glamour, make more obvious the symbols of being dollar 20 fashion. And this is not disrespecting people who buy $20 fashion, it's respecting, it's saying, hey, look at the great stuff that's here. And we're telling you, this is a place where when you come in, you'll find what you want. It's not patronizing, it's active communication, it's thoughtful. That's right. And lighting design should be first principles. What's our purpose here? We have a developer we love working with in Australia for whom we've done a tunnel. And they came to us with the original bid request was, we would like you to beautify our tunnel. Great. I think that's a good thing to do. I think we should beautify tunnels. We're about to spend, round numbers, $20 million on lighting. We should probably maximize the value you get for that $20 million. Shouldn't we. So you look at all the other things that are valuable in that project. Right. And so safety is an issue. Now. Tunnels are incredibly boring spaces. The engineers who design tunnels have a mentality of stripping everything back, reducing risk, reducing complexity, reducing materials, reducing fire hazards, reducing. It's all about simplification. And on a tunnel, which you transit in 30 seconds or a minute, that's a really good choice. We had a nine minute transit. So in nine minutes, what's the effect of running down a tunnel? And in order to just sort of reinforce with my team how long nine minutes is, I actually sat with them, and with apologies to those watching the video cast, I actually sat with them for a second. I said, this is what I want you to think about. This is what it feels like being in a tunnel. Lights going past. Now let's sit here for nine minutes. How long do you want to experience this?
And what we concluded was that as a safety thing, distraction is a bad thing, but raising attention is a good thing. And so we spent all the time not thinking about the aesthetics of the design, but on how we could raise attention levels without raising distraction levels. And if you think about the distraction levels, you're in Chicago at the moment driving down the magnificent mile and seeing all the billboards and all the great storefronts and all these things, and maybe a pretty girl or a boy or you, in my case, I love dogs, and I tend to get distracted by beautiful dogs while I'm driving. All those distractions are happening. So we're capable of dealing with a huge amount of distractions while driving. And that's actually more visually complex environment, too. And more driving. Complex environment. People can run across the road. There's traffic lights, there's turning, there's all sorts of things. Whereas in a tunnel, it's perfectly clear. So you do have some capacity to raise attention levels without causing harm, but how do you do it? And you need to then go and study. What are your first principles? What are the things which lead to a raising of attention without distracting? And those are first principle questions that you then take to your client. You say, right, we think we can do something about this in the retail thing. We think we can signal to the right potential buyers in this store. Are we getting our signals right in the tunnel? It's what are the things which raise alertness levels? And what are the things which raise risk in other environments? In a food pantry, what's your actual mission in a food pantry?
These dialogues need to happen, but we can see a lot of clients out there who've been trained by the lighting designers and not by the good ones, but, you know, have been trained by the lighting designers who send us the drawings and come back and say, hey, when you think you can send us an RPCP, well, most of our lighting's not going to end up in the RCP by, you know, to begin with. Secondly, we won't start a project with you unless you sit down with us for a full day or two day, Charrette, that's a requirement. You must join us for a, for a sit down. Charette, we want to hear you, see you, listen to you. And I'm really concerned about the industry because I think we're treating it too much like a commodity. Where things come into offices, something gets turned around and pushed out without asking the question, what else can we do now? The tunnel work was incredibly receptive and kudos to the government. The regulatory authorities came into meetings. We had planned two day meetings and they left at 11:00 a.m. on the first day saying, yeah, you're factoring in all the things that we wanted to bring to you. Keep going and let's work together. And we did thousands of driving passes and driving simulators to test that it would work and that our logic was right. Because I'm a lighting designer, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a roadway engineer. I'm not many of these things. And first principles also says, who do you work with? Who do you talk to? Who do you do all that stuff? So I'm just, I'm pretty worried about our industry. As you know, we're selling ourselves short on where lighting has impact. We're imagining that light and health, because we hit some lux level for some period of time, is going to make people healthy, that are we actually serving our clients broader interests?
[00:21:15] Speaker A: How do you address the client that comes to you and says, okay, let's do this meeting, let's sit down. But we're going to start construction in six weeks.
[00:21:26] Speaker C: Well, you really need the meeting then, because if you go from the wrong direction, you've got no time to get back on path?
That happens. And sometimes part of the first principles is this is an express project. Anyone who works in retail all the time we've had had projects. We had a house for which there was a party scheduled for six months hence, which was attacked by a bear. A bear got in and locked the door behind himself and had a pretty stressful time and did some pretty serious damage. And, you know, the question was, how do we turn around the screening room for this movie event that was coming. And this is for a producer rapidly enough, you know. So, yeah, it was a like, how do you get your head down and go? You fly out there, you spend time in the space, you put in quality thinking first, and then you do it right once.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: And then I also wonder what happens when those first principles, like a screening you're talking about, then hits the budget and other ideas and everything else comes into play. It's like, yeah, but we still have this date.
[00:22:30] Speaker C: Yeah, look, there's no good answer except professionalism. Right. And this is kind of my point. To make that happen, you need to be in constant contact with the interior designers and architects. One of the problems we have with the young designers incoming is they're not accustomed to picking up the phone without comments about anyone else's ages on this thing. There's a definition within Gen X of which I'm a member of a group called Golden X, and Golden X typically now 42 to 48 or something like that. I can't remember the exact number, but basically we're the ones who, when we were twelve or 14, if we wanted to ask a girl out, we had to call them, couldn't text them, couldn't email them, couldn't message them, couldn't slide into their DM's. We had to call them. We'd left to call them, we had to call their home phone, and we had to have game to talk to their parents and not embarrass them because they're not going to say yes to going out with you if it's embarrassing every time you call. And we learned to pick up the phone and deal with high complexity environments, even just to get, at age 14, hopefully a kiss. Highly motivated to use phones. We also learned computers from a really raw level. We were dealing with Dos and all these sorts of things, but we're young enough to really have adopted modern technology pretty well. And I think we're in the sweet spot for being able to do the things that the industry calls upon. But I worry about the people, ages 20 to 30 something who aren't accustomed to picking up the phone. How many problems get resolved by picking up the phone? How many understandings, to your point, Abby, about how do you deal with the first part of a project in a rush? Well, pick up the damn phone. Call them, talk through. What is it that's important to you? Hey, I'm thinking about this. What do you think about this? An informal phone call without a screen in front of you actually has the ability not to present material. It allows you to paint word pictures and explain an idea to someone and see if they're on board before you've spent three weeks producing visuals. So you're absolutely spot on. But I think there is a solution. I think the solution is in how we form people.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: Oh, man. I have so many questions running through my head. One I just want to throw out there. You said something about doing it right once, and one of our designers was grown up being taught, if you don't have time to do it right the first time, you better have time to do it twice. So. I love that.
[00:24:46] Speaker C: I like that phrase. Yeah, yeah.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: But I wanted to ask, how did you get to this, this way of designing?
Where did you learn to first principal's design? Where did this come from?
[00:24:57] Speaker C: I have, like, the perfect storm of formation. I mean, you couldn't plan the luck I've had in coming through the industry. I'm a lighting designer because I couldn't dance. When I was ten, my primary school was deeply, inappropriately doing the rocky horror show for their dance performance.
[00:25:16] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:25:18] Speaker C: And I was such a bad dancer that they sent me up the back to run the lighting desk, and it was just a little 24 channel manual preset desk for those who know what that means, a little lappy board, probably. And, you know, it was manual patching and all that sort of stuff. There's this nest of cables. I remember looking at this 48 way patch and saying, oh, my God, if anyone ever unplugs any one of those plugs, no one will ever know how to put it together again. It just seemed totally mystifying to me, and I was fascinated. My parents, with very good judgment, sent me off to youth theatre, and I managed to score not one, but two fabulous mentors. Poppy Searle, who remains a friend and mentor to this day, looked at me and said, okay, shut up and learn some stuff. You know, really put me to work. The first workshop was a full weekend workshop called Zen and the art of optical perfection, which turned out to be taking all light fixtures out of the ceiling of the theater, pulling them apart, cleaning them, and putting them back together again.
Six years later, I was road crew, just unloading the trucks for no doubt. And as we opened the cases, all the lights were broken. Someone had taken all of the floor stands off all of the lights, put them in the road cases, and as the road cases had been tumbled into the trucks, that they'd blown out all the lenses by chance. They'd just broken all the clips. They hadn't broken the lenses, fortunately. And I was able to say, okay, let's lay everything out. And I was a 16 year old kid at the time, but no one else knew what to do. Like, they're all calling distribution houses to see if they can get new kit in, and it's 5 hours before the door opens, you know, and I laid everything out. I'm like, the only thing that's broken here is clips. There's a lot of screws to be undone and clips to be done, but, you know, it's not a big deal. Sent someone off to get, you know, washers, because that's what you do, replace clips with emergency. And then we stripped them out, put them all back together. The last one was literally placed on stage. It was the floor light for Gwenhe, just as the backbeat was starting on just a girl. And everything came up. And that led to an invitation to go and work in the maintenance department.
In the maintenance department of one of the biggest rental houses in Australia. So I want to put together lights at the same time in parallel. Poppy thought that my social skills were a little substandard, and she might have been being generous with that, and she said, you're going to manage a stage at the National Folk Festival. She was coordinating the folk festival. So she forced me to be stage manager, and the next year she forced me to be a venue manager, and the next year she asked me to manage all stage managers and venue managers. And so from by 16, I was managing big groups. Who gets that good fortune of having a mentor who says, oh, I'm going to work with you on your social skills. I'm going to tell you how to put together a light. And then you get the luck that a whole shipment of lights comes in broken, just in the way that you can happen to fix.
And then university, I was thinking of getting out of lighting. I was pretty depressed with the whole lifestyle of rock and roll and theater lighting. And I decided to do robotics and artificial intelligence because everything is moving to robotic. Lights seemed like a way out. They're not robotic, by the way, they're just automated. But there you go. And halfway through, I got a bit bored, and sitting at a friend's dinner table mentioned that I'd chosen the wrong degree because I really wanted to do architectural lighting. His dad wanders out of the room, comes back 15 minutes later and says, you start on Monday at Barry Webb and associates, who are the top lighting design practice in Australia. Turned out 50 years earlier, they chucked javelins in little athletics and had stayed in touch. I mean, it's just such improbable luck. But that meant that I got a formation in technical, social engineering, large scale architecture. And then when I moved to London, I managed to get a job with isometrics, who are really the most refined of lifestyle lighting designers in the world. Probably you can't get lucky like that. So the question for us as an industry is not how do you make more people lucky? Because that's not a rational way of doing things. The question for us as an industry is how do we create the environments we need where everything that the people have had the good fortune like me or the people like yourselves who have, you know, whatever path you have to all the skills and knowledge and experience you have, where we're passing it down, I think we're failing to do it. I think we're absolutely failing to do it on a whole lot of bases. I think mentoring is everything, but I think we're missing the fact that mentoring is a skill. There are attitudes behind mentoring, but mentoring is a skill that can be taught. And the better you are at something, the more likely you are to do it and the more likely you are to do it with enthusiasm. Right. As an industry we're completely disinterested in that. And yeah, I know this is the silhouette program and I have mixed feelings about that, but I'm glad that it exists. It's better than not existing. But we need to recognize that the people who have the experience are in their forties thirties and forties fifties. And the people who are coming into our practices are in their twenties. And they're not accustomed to top down, boss led processes. They're looking for relationship led stuff. Well, that's mentoring. So as an industry we really have to start thinking about mentoring in a really serious sense. I've started conversations with people in the industry and in our organizations ies and Ialden beyond about why don't we make the threshold into professional membership, which happens around the age of 30 when you've got five to ten years of professional experience that those organizations pay for you to do a eight day retreat with a bunch of other lighting designers to be taught mentoring skills? Because think about the value of that. Those are the people who are committed to being in the industry. They're bought in. They're also the ones who are ready to build a followership. So their benefit is they get a followership, they get people to deliver their work to work well with them. And everyone younger with them has a reason to stay in their practices is to engage with those people to move things forward. It's not cheap, but it's actually not much different price than what we're spending on american airlines and Hyatt. Place to get a bunch of kids who may or may not stay in the industry, age 22, who don't understand what they're seeing, to go to conferences across the world.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Well, we don't use Hyatt. We use the most expensive hotels that happen to be in the most expensive places in the country.
[00:31:18] Speaker C: Well, there is that.
[00:31:21] Speaker A: Or not in the country. In Canada or Mexico or anything.
[00:31:24] Speaker C: Yeah, that's right.
[00:31:25] Speaker B: I was going to go somewhere that might be a bit dangerous, but I'll just, you know, you said something about those of us who are mentoring are in our. What did you say? Forties, maybe fifties? I feel like our industry, this is something Avi and I are doing intentionally, is really bringing shining light on the voices of those who are in their forties and fifties, because the people I looked up to when I graduated from college are still leading all the conversations. I feel like we Gen Xers haven't taken the reins on that.
[00:31:57] Speaker C: I think that's true to some extent. I'm not quite as convinced. I think that's within the core circles of IlD and ies. That's probably true. I think a bit wider. There's a bit more voice. I was in a car on the way to enlighten with Sean O'Connor, and both of us are counting a few more gray hairs than when we first met back in the day. And we were realizing that when we first met, actually, at an ILD jury for the ILD awards in 2009, I think that we were dealing with Charles, but Charles Stone, obviously, you know, Elvis Charles, you know, he's a mononym. Yeah. We were seeing Charles then at the age we are now. And so you're not wrong. Like, we are now arriving at the age at the time when these people we think of as being, you know, formative and key. We're at the age we are. And I think putting the spotlight on the people who have the knowledge and experience is really valuable. But there's a key thing the industry has to do is to make those people capable of passing information on. Well, this is a great conversation. I'm really pleased to have it. But we need to make sure, like, this conversation is for the people who are already thinking about the things we're thinking about. What the people in their twenties need is the things that they need to be thinking about for today. They need to be thinking about how to engage with clients, they need to be thinking about how to engage with architects, how to negotiate something. How do you win the faith of an architect to be allowed to modify their architecture in order to make the lighting work? Those are skills which we have to teach. And this conversation we have now is important, but it's not teaching that. And them listening to this podcast isn't going to give them those skills.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: How to have that uncomfortable conversation as Derek was talking about. Right?
[00:33:34] Speaker C: Yeah, but it doesn't even have to be an uncomfortable conversation. Sometimes it's just opening the door to understanding what's something about.
You know, there's a concept in psychology called the Overton window, and we hear about it in politics. You know, what's acceptable in politics? And we've all seen the Overton window being stretched over the last few years for what is acceptable for a politician to say and not get cancelled and so on. People talk about cancellation, but in fact, the Overton window was much smaller for what was acceptable to say. But the same thing happens in every relationship. What is the acceptable thing? The things that you can talk to your husband or wife about is very different to the things that you would talk to your grandma about is very different to the thing you talked to someone at the bus stop. Right.
Every relationship has an Overton window. And teaching a kid in the office about how you open the Overton window with your architect about architecture is a big deal. If you want to reshape a ceiling, don't go in on the first minute of the first meeting and say, hey, we think the ceiling form is bad. Won't work. You know, misses opportunities. We really want you to turn it from a barrel vault into a, into a peaked roof. We want to do this, we want to do that. Don't. If you want to start opening the Overton window and just expanding your ability, it's like, oh, this would be a great place for sconce. We can't do that because the door swing is the wrong way that's going to hit the sconce. Oh, we could change the door swing. Great. Now we're talking about modifying their architecture in service of lighting. The next we talk about, well, you know, this mirror is fantastic here in the bathroom. We could light it like that, but if it didn't go, wall to Wallace would be able to get better side light. And you won't have to put those concerts that you're complaining about on the walls. You'll be able to have sidelight from your mirror. Now we're talking about reshaping the building elevation, and you just keep going through. You expand the Overton window. Right. And we all don't intuitively like, not everyone geeks out and uses the technical language for it, but these are the soft skills that people in their forties and fifties have that the people in their twenties need.
Where do you teach that? Mentoring, you know. Right.
[00:35:25] Speaker B: They learn it by watching and by explaining it.
[00:35:28] Speaker C: One of the biggest mistakes I made over the last five years, and it's cost a huge amount to my office, a huge amount of money, time and frustration.
Is that going into the pandemic? I'd spent a lot of time forming a middle in the office, and we got a fabulous middle. They had seen me teach them, but I hadn't explained how I taught them. So they were very good at doing the things, but they didn't yet have the skills to pass what they just learned on to the next generation. They'd seen me do it, and they'd picked up some of it. But modeling wasn't enough. Modeling being the technical term for getting people to see your behavior and be able to follow it. Data modeling and explanation is one of the key mentoring skills. How do you model something and tell people what you're doing and why you're doing it? When we walk out of a meeting, standard question gets asked, what did you learn? And it's asked because it's saying, hey, you didn't just sit there an hour watching me talk. And I can talk. I can wave my arms around, but I don't want people just sitting there vague because I want them thinking, okay, what am I seeing? What's happening? How is this moving? Why did that, why did the client agree to that thing, which we went into the meeting, them saying no to? Why did Thomas completely change the lighting design when he heard what a new fact that the client gave us? Because that's part of first principles, listening and making sure, you know, if you want people to see that and think about it, you have to ask them, what did you learn? The funny thing was, we were driving back for some lighting tests. We're doing some innovative stuff to on dark sky for a project. We're doing some tests. We borrowed a friend's 14 story building and doing some glare free lighting off it. And we're driving back, and halfway on the drive, I sort of turned around to the car and said, so what did you learn? And the driver, who's one of our pm's. Oh, damn it. You got the question in before me.
Oh, you know, so we've made it part of the culture, and we've made it part of the expectation. But if you don't tell people what you're modeling, it's not just people seeing how you do things. That works for the savants. You know, it works for the people who formed our industry who are savants. And Charles is a savant. Howard was a savant. There are lots of these people who see something, learn it, absorb it. Most of us don't have that luxury. Most of us need people to put words on things. That's where mentoring comes in.
[00:37:30] Speaker A: So, how do we. How do we do it?
[00:37:33] Speaker C: Man, I wish I knew.
[00:37:34] Speaker A: How do we make this happen?
[00:37:36] Speaker C: This is a play for help. I mean.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: What'S. What's fascinating. I mean, we've. We've chatted a little bit about this, but it hasn't clicked in, in my head as much as it has at this moment because of. I mean, just two things I wrote down that I like. Can't wait to look up and start instigating instantly. In our practice is that Overton window concept, right? Like, that happens all the time, right? It's a soft learning of somebody, and I love that. But also, we have a new, new designer just joined us, and we always struggle with getting new people in a small practice.
And it's beyond revit and 3d studio max, right? It's learning how we do it, why we do it, why we make these decisions, the process of making the decisions, the troubleshooting.
Sorry, I'm going to veer off for a second, but the kindergarten teacher last night was talking about mathematic, and she was talking about how she's gonna teach math, but she clicked on something that I instantly translated into troubleshooting education. Right?
[00:38:46] Speaker C: Yeah. Right. Totally.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: Like, how do we take these concepts and put them together and make them available to the industry, right? Like that. What did you learn? Like, shame on me for walking out of this two hour design meeting and not turning to her, and I wanted her to come to the meeting so she saw how the sauces were made, and then I didn't turn to her and say, so what'd you learn? Like, I mean, it's just kind of. Just that that little bit is, like, freaking brilliant.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: It's brilliant. It is.
[00:39:19] Speaker C: These are things that I've learned from other people, too.
I can't tell you who that one comes from, but I'm sure I borrowed it from someone. I mean, that's part of the reason I want to have, like, a formalized mentoring training for people like, I. And, you know, when you teach people to mentor, you also remind them that they have to show how they're mentoring. You know, you have to show how you're doing and explain it and so on, because otherwise the next generation doesn't do it.
[00:39:41] Speaker B: There are so many mentoring programs or I think every organization in our industry has tried to create a mentoring program, but nobody has tried to teach people how to do mentorship.
[00:39:52] Speaker C: I was going to say every organization in our industry has scheduled mentoring sessions. I'm not sure they've actually done a mentoring program.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: No.
[00:39:58] Speaker C: And, you know, I don't want to speak ill if people are trying to do the right thing, but just to kind of give you the shape of it. The ask for the mentors in the silhouette awards is 1 hour a month for six months. But where's the skilling up of the mentors to make them able to do it? And is 1 hour a month an appropriate density? And some of it's been fabulous. They've had some fabulous successes because they've had some fabulous mentors and some really ambitious mentees and they've made it work. So I don't like, again, I salute them doing it, but it shows you the model is not about how do we upskill you for the rest of your life.
[00:40:33] Speaker B: The argument, it's accidental. It's accidental success.
[00:40:36] Speaker C: Yeah, I think even that's a bit. It's lucky success. I think accidental suggests that it wasn't without positivity. But I agree with you. I think if you look at these sorts of things, if you say, well, the industry invests $2,000 each in every member of staff age 30, right. Hypothetical. For weeks go away training, and that makes them a better mentor. You get 35 more years out of them until they retire at 65. You know, what did that cost you per year? Because these skills are retained skills. They're not skills that fade, right. I mean, details, but will fade, but the fundamentals of it won't. There's no point in us going to Charles and Barbara and saying, hey, we want to train you to be better mentors. Their end of career, they've done amazing things. They've built a huge number of people. The people who we need to move are the ones who are 30 because that investment stays in the industry for 35 years. It's not the people of 22. First of all, they don't know lighting yet to teach. And secondly, they're swamped in everything. And thirdly, we don't know if they're going to stay in the industry. It's the 30 year olds where we need to invest. It's also hopefully a snowball. I mean, it should be one of these things where those skills get passed on. It's not like they're given once. Give people a big theoretical math education on lighting, they're not going to teach other people the whole theoretical math education. Give them mentoring skills. They will.
[00:41:55] Speaker B: Okay, so you're not a quiet committee member. What are next steps here? You've come in and dropped your flashbang. Now what?
[00:42:03] Speaker C: Well, first of all, anyone who wants to talk to me from any of the committees, I will happily talk them through this stuff. I would advocate that everyone else in the industry go into their committee meetings and say, hey, what are we doing to upskill? What are we doing to make the mentoring the thing? Because knowledge retention is what this is about. As the mononyms retire, we're losing huge amounts of knowledge that could be passed on. As people our age, you know, find ourselves ever more in admin and doing podcasts, you know, what are we going to be? You know, what time do we have with our young guys in our office to teach them? We, those of us who. Those of you who do committee work need to step up and say, you know what? This is where things are going wrong. And the best thing is that if you're doing knowledge retention, it means that all the other things that everyone knows. I mean, it's great that Avi is one of our industry stars on Dali. That's fantastic. But as an industry, we want to extract that from his brain and spread it as wide as possible from his business point of view. Maybe it's an advantage to be the guy, maybe it's not. But we actually have a situation on a lounge in an airport where it took 16 weeks to shake out the Dali loops properly because the electricians didn't know what they were doing. And so we've abandoned Dali on the next in the rollout because no one was educating the electricians on the ground. Mentoring skills also apply to being able to see when. Oh, okay, I'm specifying this complex thing. I can see that the people at the table are looking a bit blank on this. I'm going to offer to be there for 3 hours and show them how it all plugs together. It would have saved me eight days on site to have given them 3 hours of training, same set of skills.
I feel very sad for every retirement where we haven't gotten the best out of that person who's retiring. I think that's a loss. And that's not to say that a lot of them haven't put a huge amount of effort in. That's not my point at all. But what if we could have had 35 years of them being skilled mentors with all that they know?
[00:44:01] Speaker A: Yeah. The image comes to mind of the tree, right. Where you have that initial point, and then you have all these stars that come out of it. Right. And it's very common. Right. In the architecture world in Chicago. Right. Everybody talks about going to school at IIT, and this connection to IIT brings everybody back. And honestly, the connection to Kujdenhe architecture, too, is very pop like, connected in the Chicago market as well, which rock chalk all the time. But I don't see that right now in the lighting world. Right. You do theatrically. Right. The Ken billingtons. But yeah, there's a piece missing here that I'm so curious how to make it happen. Obviously, you gotta continue the conversation. You have to get this out there, which I'm so excited that, that we have this platform to do that. And coming upon us very soon is a place where a lot of lighting designers will be together in San Diego, in one of those expensive hotels that you don't get any points for.
But maybe there's an opportunity to stretch this a little bit further and take on a group.
You know, one of my thinkings with creating this podcast was to have the conversations that just happen in bars and restaurants and record them and make them public, but also to do something that I think some of our organization should have been doing a long time ago, but they just dont have the time, the finances, whatever. Fine, then well do it ourselves.
[00:45:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:45:50] Speaker A: So I wonder if there is this opportunity in a few short weeks. Quite honestly, I think it's less than a month ish. Yeah, it's Sukkot. So, yeah, it's less than a month to get a group together and. And find a path to start putting this together. Right. And find speakers and find all this. And. Because it's only going to make all of our businesses and. And all those people that are coming up more successful. And to your point about Dolly, like, I was very conflicted about educating the entire lighting industry on the stupidity they're doing of using anything else. But the reality is, we had the conversation and we said, well, if everybody starts doing it, that my life's going to be a heck of a lot easier. So we're going to make. Everybody's going to be better. And quite honestly, that's the best thing for the industry. Right? Yeah, everybody gets better.
[00:46:46] Speaker C: Yeah. Look, I mean, we're not in competition. We've turned away two and a half years of work in the last four months. So, you know, there's still slopping around there. Plenty of work in the industry.
[00:46:55] Speaker A: Send them to me.
[00:46:57] Speaker C: Alas, not your market, I'm afraid. They don't want Dali.
[00:47:01] Speaker A: Right? Yeah.
[00:47:03] Speaker C: Jokes aside, look, the ability to put together something like this is actually harder than you'd think. I actually talked to a manufacturer who reached out to me and said, we'd like to sponsor you to do something on this topic there. Yes. Okay. This is what I need. And they said, can you do it in 45 minutes? Oh, no, we'd like to record it so it can be an industry resource. Now, I'm all for recording things and making it industry resource, but you don't teach people soft skills. So for enlightened, I have to say I got approached by a manufacturer who asked, you know, what could we do? You know, about this topic of mentoring, you know, what do you need? And told them what we needed, and then they said, oh, great, can you do it in 45 minutes?
Which is not terribly helpful. You're not going to get substance in 45 minutes. You've got to get people on board for what you want. So, look, I think the place to, the first place to tackle it, you know, if you want to call to arms for things that could happen pretty immediately, it's actually the people who own businesses or lead businesses who can choose to invest in bringing outside help.
We have an organizational psych who comes in and works with us every two years, and we do 14 to a three hour sessions, and then we do weeks retreat, and we deal with communication skills, we deal with relationships, we deal with managing emotions and all those sorts of things. And that's one side of things internally, because we're very conscious of these topics. We spend more time talking about them, setting up the culture of what did you learn? And all those sorts of things. But I think it's the business owners who have the power and the industry to move things. I'd love it if the organizations would do something. They're blanking.
[00:48:33] Speaker A: But, Thomas, you're talking about things that you're doing. Do you have a list of resources that could ultimately be shared? I would be really interested to start that inside of more lights, but I need a place to start, too.
[00:48:49] Speaker C: Yeah. So the organizational psych thing. No, I don't have a list of resources. And for a really simple reason, it tends to be, you need to find someone who's sympathetic with what your business is about and what you're doing. So it's research. It's reaching out and finding out who's out there. You're not looking for someone who's selling you a package. You're looking for someone who can hear what you're about. Lighting is such an odd duck industry.
We are odd ducks. Our clients are our ducks. Our processes are, you know, odd little paddling ponds to play in. You know, we're an odd duck industry. So you're not going to get someone who's used to training, you know, has programs for 30,000 employees of General Motors who can then come and apply that to a lighting design practice. It's not appropriate. So you have to go local, you have to go personal. You have to find the organizational psych if you're going to do it that way. In terms of skills, I think we need to have people writing books about this stuff and making that stuff accessible. I think we need to have people who open up workshops. I mean, you think about the fabulous Jan Moya landscape workshops, where they're longer and more hands on. People who have these skills maybe need to be doing this stuff. Now, avi, I suspect you're going to say, well, so when are you doing one? I can see that question brewing. And alas, like so many business owners, I have a complex life. I have children a little older than yours, but not much with their own complex needs. I have 27 designers sitting around me who I have to form. I have 70 live projects, all of whom, you know, the clients need attention. Where do we get this? I think we have to outsource. I think we have to read and listen with interest. I think we have to listen endlessly to podcasts. There are endless fabulous ones like hidden brain, which really spend time thinking about relationships and how you move relationships and so on. And I think we could put together a bit of a notes page for this where we can pull those things. But I think that's, that's where we start, you know? But in reality, it's a call to arms for the committee members to, you know, follow the flashbang.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: You should speak on this topic at least. I mean, do the 45 minutes and do it, do it as a call to arms and then someone will take it up. Because you know what, Thomas? I did that for. I mean, wild came to be as a result of me speaking at an enlightened conference and saying, hey, we need something for women in this industry. And I don't want to be the one to do it. I don't have time to do it, but somebody needs to do something.
[00:51:11] Speaker C: It's interesting. I actually reached out to Wilde and offered when they were setting up some mentoring stuff, to do some training on that stuff, and I got no response. Really? Yeah. I've always wondered whether I was thinking.
[00:51:21] Speaker B: About wild when you were talking.
[00:51:24] Speaker C: I was wondering whether I came across as mansplaining.
[00:51:28] Speaker B: I'll find out.
[00:51:30] Speaker C: I hope it wasn't, but I didn't have the capacity to be a mentor over a long period of time at the time. So I said, well, look, I could do some intensive time on this and, you know, and I would wish them well if they. If they reached out. There's no resentment in that. But it's. It's, you know, it's one of those things. It's. It's very hard for people to say, you know, this is what we want to focus on. So if there are some people advocating behind me, I will make the time. Unfortunately, I won't be able to enlighten this year.
Complex kids. Yeah. Well, I guess we have to go around, do a circle of endorsements amongst us all again, don't we?
This podcast has been brought to you by the fabulous people at more lights, Abiel Lee.
[00:52:10] Speaker B: And Rock's popular.
[00:52:13] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:52:14] Speaker A: Well, I think this is great, man. There's so much more to chat about. But, yeah, I think I have so many notes to follow up on from this conversation, and I hope the audience really takes it to heart and reaches out to Thomas and those committee members, those people who have the extra time other than what Thomas and I and Lisa have to take on some of these things. I know. I, for one, would be happy to assist, but again, can't commit the time. Right? That's the hard part of where my family is, where. Where my business is. But this is so important, and I really appreciate the conversation. I appreciate you taking the time to share it with us.
[00:53:02] Speaker C: You're most welcome. Thank you very much for creating this forum for us all.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: I do hope that this is the start of, you know, this is the match lighting the flame that makes something happen.
[00:53:11] Speaker C: Agreed.
[00:53:12] Speaker A: All right, thanks, everybody.
[00:53:15] 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.
[00:53:31] 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 more lights for your next endeavor.
