WHAT IS NOT A LIGHTING DESIGN?

Lighting is the conscious use of light to achieve functional and aesthetic effects. What about by design? For example, what is or isn't lighting design, do we know?

Lighting designers came together with IALD (International Association of Lighting Designers), which was established in the USA in 1969 to recognize the profession of "Lighting Designer" and to set standards in the sector. However, lighting design is a very new and little-known profession in our country. As Turkey's first independent architectural lighting design office, we feel responsible for the awareness and correct growth of lighting design. As experts in the kitchen of the business, we would like to express what the lighting design is, and more importantly, what it is not so that the wrongs that are known to be true and the sector can be expressed correctly.

Lighting design is not a study to save architecture from the darkness. It is to design the experience that architecture and people will live with light.

Lighting design is not a luxury or a privilege. It is a requirement for a good standard of living. Light has a powerful effect on us psychologically, even if we are not aware of it. With its powerful effect, it drags us into different moods during the day, entertains, relaxes, motivates, guides, adds value, makes us happy, and sometimes even makes us unhappy. For this reason, we cannot ignore the effect of lighting on the user while designing the space during the project process.

Lighting design is not the selection of products to be used in the project. Lighting design is the design of the products and techniques necessary to illuminate an architectural space by its standards conveniently and sensitively, depending on the concept created "without any product sales concern" and directing the light. The only goal is to design the right light in the right place.

Lighting design is not a subject to be consulted at the last stage of the construction process. Expert lighting designers in this field, like an architect, take part in the process and provide design services to the project. A lighting designer, architect, and electrical engineer will be included in the team from the first stages of the project, while producing correct and on-site solutions, saving time with the business partnership and enabling the investor to profit in the first stages. Therefore, it should be included in the process from the very beginning.

Lighting design is not a process that can be managed by an architect, electrical engineer, or any other discipline. It should be done by a lighting designer who has expertise in this area. A lighting designer is a person who, with the lighting education he received, has the knowledge and experience of mastering the behavior of light with materials, producing alternative solutions, and directing perception with light in spaces. It integrates the lighting correctly with the architecture and illuminates the spaces by using useful, sensitive, and correct techniques within the framework of the foreseen budget. The aim is to design the right light in the right place “independently of the brand”. The architect is responsible for the project, and the lighting designer is responsible for the correct management of the lighting item of the project and the result that will emerge as a result of the consultancy he gives. For this reason, the lighting design should be done by the lighting designer.

Although the awareness of the concept of lighting design in our country has come a long way since the day we started, we think that it will soon take its place among the standard services that should be taken in every project to be made. Because in every project, at all times and under all conditions, the light should be designed without leaving it to chance. The light should be designed by experts.