November 2006, Issue #52
Illuminating Engineering
It's not about just having the proper number of foot candles. It's understanding architecture, understanding brightness relationships, understanding how people feel in a space…. It's all about people ultimately. You're honoring the architecture, but you have to be sure the human component is forward in your decisions.
—Stephen Bernstein, IALD, IESNA, Principal, Cline, Bettridge, Bernstein Lighting Design
Illuminating engineers design and engineer systems that provide lighting in the built environment—the structures we visit every day—such as schools, offices, theaters, sports facilities, stores, and even bridges and roadways. Illuminating engineering brings new meaning to the term "state of the art." They combine the best of design aesthetics with state-of-the-art technology.
Comprehensive lighting design considers the amount of light required to perform tasks effectively, the energy consumed, and the aesthetic impact of the lights on the setting—whether interior or exterior. Lighting projects in some work environments such as hospitals or sporting facilities place appropriate lighting to accomplish the tasks as the top priority. For buildings, such as warehouses and offices, the most important consideration is often energy efficiency. Other buildings like museums, monuments, and hotels often place aesthetics and creating a mood though dramatic lighting that has an emotional appeal, as their top priority.
While most lighting projects involve electrical lighting systems, daylighting is also an important area within the field. Lighting designers and engineers can work to use effective daylighting within a building, supplementing it where necessary with electrical lighting. Complex lighting design often requires mathematical modeling to check for uniformity and quantity of illumination from all sources including available day light and light reflected off walls, ceilings, and floors.
Illuminating engineers require knowledge of physics, engineering, electrical wiring, architecture, and design as well as installation, maintenance, and operation of lighting systems. They strive for excellence in all forms of lighting:
- Interiors
- Exteriors
- Sports facilities
- Roads, tunnels, bridges, and other transportation structures
- Festival lighting
- Theaters and other entertainment venues
Energy Consumption
Buildings use up to 50 percent of energy consumed in the United States, and artificial lighting consumes between 20 and 50 percent of that. That means that between 10 and 25 percent of energy used in the United State is expended to light buildings. In large office buildings, effective strategies can sometimes reduce lighting costs 90 percent by selecting the right lighting for each area of use, integrating lighting design into space planning and architecture, selecting the best available technology to conserve energy, ensuring proper maintenance, and training personnel to minimize energy waste.
Light for Health and Productivity
Selecting the right light intensity and color spectrum for tasks has another important benefit. It contributes to the productivity and health of occupants, reducing stress and associate effects such as headaches or increased blood pressure. Latest studies reveal that only 80 percent of neural fibers connected to the eye are used for sight. The remaining 20 percent send their signals to other areas of the body and brain including those that control the body's timeclock and endocrine glands, thus helping to regulate many aspects of our hormones, health, and emotions.
Light for Safety, Community, and Commerce
Good lighting also makes an important contribution to road safety, crime prevention, and the environment. It promotes a feeling of security and well being within a community. Bad lighting creates unsafe conditions. This can dramatically affect the economy of an area. For a relatively small expense, housing developments, town centers, and industrial areas can be transformed producing a positive effect on quality of life for all.
State of the Art: Where Art Meets Science
Illuminating engineering is both an art and a science. For students who are interested in both architecture and engineering, illuminating engineering can be a great fit.
Lighting is becoming more technically challenging with many new light sources to consider. According to Stephen Bernstein, one of the most promising new mediums is LED. Those tiny red dots that once were only used to tell you appliances are on, actually come in a full rainbow of colors and offer an exciting new type of lighting with very low energy usage. Their small size allows lighting designers to integrate light into architecture in new ways.
What's exciting about the field is that we are working with architects and interior designers, allowing their work to be viewed. Lighting is not only technical, there's a big artistic element to it as well. It reveals form. It shapes structures. It can reveal materials so you can see things in a different way. It also has an emotional component to it. You can make something look friendly, dramatic, or reverential. Manipulating light in response to the architecture allows you to create a new composition with the architect.
—Stephen Bernstein, CBBLD
Architectural, Electrical, or Mechanical Engineering—Many Paths to Take
Most illuminating engineers enter the field from one of three engineering disciplines: architectural engineering, electrical engineering, or mechanical engineering.
Graduates are typically hired by lighting, engineering, and architectural or architectural engineering design firms as well as manufacturers of lighting equipment.
Related Links:
