Lighting in Design May-June 2016

Teaching old lighting systems new tricks

by Chuck Ross

I n the not-too-distant future, the time may come when electrical contractors entertain their grandchildren with tales of lighting fixtures that existed for the sole purpose of illumination. Moving beyond novelty lamps that perform smartphone tricks, connected lighting 2.0 has arrived, bringing new notions of the role interior and exterior lumi- naires can play in larger, building-wide (and even city-wide) operations. For manufacturers facing a need for new business models, these changes cannot come soon enough.

dim and colour-shift using a smartphone touch- screen. As such products have become more commonplace, developers have begun looking at lighting systems with an appreciation of a previously overlooked fact: along with its accompanying power sources, lighting is almost everywhere in today’s built environment. As a result, the innovation of solid-state lighting based on light-emitting diodes (LEDs) has, in some ways, made individual fixtures less important when compared to what a collection of fixtures can offer as a networking platform. 
Such rethinking is critical because manufactur- ers need creativity to add value to long-living LED products that rarely need replacing and could quick- ly become commoditised. With features such as zero-to-100-percent dimming and colour-tempera- ture shifting into the mainstream, companies are now looking at the large-scale lighting upgrades going on in commercial

Looking beyond the apps
 Just a couple of years ago, tech reviewers were wowed by app-controlled lamps that users could

and office buildings, along with city streets, as an oppor- tunity to pivot their busi- ness focus from manu-

facturing lamps and fixtures to facilitating data gathering and communications. In fact, some of the most sophisticated

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LiD MAY/JUN 2016