The future of architectural lighting for office, healthcare, retail and many other applications will combine three key trends:
1. COFFERS: Healthy lighting for interior commercial environments will demand that occupants get lots exposure to big, soft vertical planes of light to ensure the lower part of the retina is saturated with bright, blue light in the morning and midday periods, but maintains soft, warm, yet useful lighting in the evening and night. You want to cut glare from your design? Use big volumes of low-contrast illumination. To provide this over vast floorplates where occupants roam freely, indirect illuminated coffers is the obvious solution. These ensure that no matter the occupants’ position or view direction, their eyes receive high volumes of glare-free melanopic lighting.
2. BIOMATERIALS: We can’t continue with carbon intensive and toxic architectural construction systems like anodized aluminum or endless synthetic plastics. We must find unique ways to use natural materials in as close to a raw state as possible. There are subliminal perception benefits to being surrounded by natural materials – they have inherent natural beauty that can be used to tremendous material effect.
3. NATURAL FORMS: Please show me where unrelenting fields of orthogonal grids exist in nature. They don’t. Which is why raw exposed/industrial ceilings are so popular, by default of there being few better alternatives. But in eliminating the endless, oppressive fields of white ceiling panels, we’ve eliminated the big old reflector surface used for indirect illumination. We need to take advancements in parametric design and digital manufacturing to create interior systems that better reflect natural compositions to sooth the human psyche.
So we combine glowing coffers constructed out of biomaterials in rich, non-orthogonal visual compositions. And COB LED flexstrip makes all those customized forms sooooo easy to manufacture.
Lucept 