Research Design Connection: Lighting Design Challenge

The Newsham team, from the National Research Council Canada, faced a design challenge – one that made most office lighting projects seem like a piece of cake. As they detail, “We conducted a lighting retrofit study at Canadian Forces Station Alert (latitude 82°30’N), the world’s most northerly, permanently inhabited settlement. Existing recessed fluorescent troffers with nominally 6500K T8 lamps on electronic ballasts, providing ambient lighting in selected offices, were replaced, one-for-one, by 5000K LED luminaires. The new luminaires had higher efficacy and a high colour rendering index, and were dimmable at the room level with a wall control. A variety of wellbeing measures pertaining to the office occupants, and energy use data, were collected before and after the retrofit. Preliminary results suggest that, as predicted, the enhanced features of the LED system led to a generally better appraisal of the lighted environment, and substantial lighting energy savings of [approximately] 30%.”

Lights were modified in a section of the station’s offices and data were collected from users during one of the area’s darker months, February. The station experiences no daylight during the height of North American winter and the reverse situation during its summer. Energy consumption was monitored over a two year period.

Guy Newsham, Jennifer Veitch, Chantal Arsenault, Steven Kruithof, Sandra Mancini, Anca Galasiu, and Gisele Amow. 2015. “Improving the Well-Being of High-Arctic Residents By Modifying Light Exposure While Saving Energy.” NRC Publications Archive and Proceedings of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) Annual Conference, 2015-11-09

Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.