Turbo-Charged Lighting Design

Abstract

The task of the lighting designer has become very complex, involving thousands of choices for fixture types and hundreds of possible lamps. The designer who can consider the most combinations of these items guarantees each client the optimal lighting conditions and the best energy efficiency. This kind of professional service, however, is not available from the software design programs presently on the market. These programs generally let the designer analyze one room at a time, while providing perhaps three possible fixtures to choose from. Additional choices can be accessed from the software’s data base, though at considerable expense in time and patience. This is a real hindrance when designing for a complex structure such as a hospital, which has many spaces with different task-specific lighting standards. The author was challenged by lighting-level requirements that spanned the range of possibilities, and was able to devise an accurate, expedient solution using a dBase language program. The result was a powerful tool integrating the entire gamut of design possibilities provided by the luminaire industry.