Call Yourself a Lighting Designer?
John Bullock. lighting designer in waiting circa1975
Crivvins, but there’s been rowdy behaviour in the quad with those nasty boys from Lighting Design causing trouble with those nice Electrical Engineer chappies. And now the head has got involved and there’ll be detentions for sure.
It seems that Gardner, long-acknowledged to be the main bullyboy in the LD house has been at his name-calling again, and went so far as to call the M&E house lads ‘design-illiterate’! I mean - hang on one bally moment! That’s a bit below the belt, Gardy – and you know how much the truth can hurt!
But now we have a developing situation, as they describe it in the Foreign Office, between Gardner of LD house and Burton of M&E house that can only lead to satchels at 10 paces. Burton’s come back with that old engineers’ riposte of lighting designers being ‘soft-skilled’. It’s not original – we’ve heard it all before. It smacks of spanners and lacks the elan of the designer. It’s no wonder that gentlefolk used to consider engineers as being beneath their class.
Still: it created a ponder in me, as I was working out the circuit loadings of a garden lighting scheme that’s been taking up my time. (note to any engineers reading this – that last sentence contains what we call a ‘subtext’) Just when did I consider myself to be a designer? After all, I’d got all my certificates by 1975, but when did the penny drop that I was no longer a number-crunching illumination engineer, but had actually passed over into the lighting land of milk and money? Hallelujah.
There’s an idea that an education in anything at all, provided that you get a bit of paper at the end of it, means that you are gifted and capable enough to get on with .... well, whatever it is that’s written on the certificate. But I beg to differ. A person who holds the Bartlett MSc in Lighting is not a lighting designer, they’re just a person who holds the Bartlett MSc in Lighting. The knowledge is wrapped up in equations and numerical relationships and codes of practice and light meters. But that’s not design.
The bit about being a designer only comes with a full and proper engagement with the world and all its problems, where you’re able to take all the stuff that you’ve learned and turn it into something greater than the contents of the textbooks that you’ve been studying. Maybe that’s the ‘soft-skilled’ charge that Dave Burton has placed against us – the ability to take hard numbers and translate them into something that is of benefit to humankind.
So: call me ‘soft-skilled’ if you like. I’ll take that as a compliment – and I’ll see you later in the promised land.
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John Bullock Lighting Design: 01305 889256
