Where will light fittings come from?
23-01-2017
With so much attention being paid to the Internet of Things; systems connectivity; data harvesting; customer tracking and the like – and all of it being achieved via the lighting installation, should we be concerned that so little attention is being paid to the thing that is at the heart of all of this technology, the light fitting itself?
Analysts are telling us that the future (that’s the financial future of capital investment in lighting, of course) lies in this new services sector of lighting, where sensors within luminaires will continually gather data; data which will then be processed and the results sold back to clients, who bought the light fittings in the first place in order to faciltate the generation of the data.
What’s missing from the discussion is anything to do with what we might be doing with light fitting design, how we might be exploiting the continuing development of LED technology and how things like fashion and styling might have a role to play in our lives. I have no problem with data harvesting per se (though I find some of the more dystopian consequences from that data harvesting to be quite scary for employees and customers alike) but I don’t see the business of lighting design benefitting if the financial drivers behind the technology care more about signal coverage than what building interiors actually look like.
