November 2023
IESNYC President Shoshanna Segal initiates conversations with colleagues and leaders in allied organizations to discuss relationships between the organizations and respective roles in different building industry sectors. We’re raising awareness about lighting, building coalitions, and covering hot topics – all to advance the art and science of lighting to benefit society as a whole.
Craig DiLouie, Education Director, Lighting Controls Association
IESNYC: The IESNYC is very excited about the NYControlled event coming on November 14. We really want to get out the message that controls are an important part of the lighting designer's toolkit.
DILOUIE: Important, absolutely. It’s a core idea for us: “A good lighting design includes a good controls design.” LCA really wants to support this event. It’s the first one, so we’re eager to help spread that message and see it succeed.
IESNYC: We appreciate LCA promoting the NYControlled event. It's a gargantuan task, and the volunteers are doing amazing work.
DILOUIE: We’re proud to be recognized by NYControlled as an Allied Partner of the event. Gary Meshberg [of ENCELIUM/Legrand], our current Vice Chair and incoming Chair, is now on the board of NYControlled, and I think he's adding a lot of great energy.
We have the country’s only highly pre-qualified audience of professionals who are super-interested in lighting controls. They come to our website; they take our courses; they subscribe to our newsletter. This is the portion of the lighting industry that, when it comes to lighting controls, they’re engaged.
We’re happy to share this audience with interested parties. That’s why we’ve partnered with DALI Alliance, DLC, IES, and all sorts of different organizations. We're eager to see NYControlled succeed, because it shouts the importance of lighting controls and the need to learn about them. The lighting industry needs this event.
Whose job is it?
IESNYC: IES LP-16 [Documenting Control Intent Narratives and Sequence of Operations] is a great document, and I'm proud to have contributed to it. It’s very focused on moving from intent into sequence. The more I work with electrical engineers, the more I think that they may be better suited to do the sequencing.
DILOUIE: A lighting designer can do both a control narrative and even a basic sequence of operations at a reasonably strategic level. At that level, controls are all inputs and outputs. Where you have multiple inputs and outputs, you want to define what takes precedence – a hierarchy of logic. This defines what you want the lighting to respond to, what you want it to do, and where you want it done. The designer can then turn that over to an engineer or other party for more detailed specifications. The more detail the designer can produce, the more value they can provide to the project and the lighting system..
IESNYC: And where do you think integrators fit into all of this?
DILOUIE: “Integrator” I think may be more of a role than a profession at the moment. From what I’m seeing, it’s more common that a project stakeholder takes on the role of integration than a professional integrator is involved.
An important part of this is that integration isn’t just one thing. It can range from integrating lighting control systems to integrating lighting controls with other building systems, potentially with Internet of Things capabilities. You’ll probably find more integration specialists on those projects.
Either way, integration is becoming more and more important.
Focus on education
IESNYC: So when lighting designers are coming to LCA for education, are you providing more basics, or more advanced educational modules?
DILOUIE: Education Express is our online, free 24/7 education platform. Our courses are registered with the AIA, and we have courses that are prerequisites for CALCTP certification in California. Also, the whole curriculum is a prerequisite for NALMCO CLCP certification, and our credits are recognized by NCQLP; the state of California; and by DLC, which recognizes us as an education provider for networked lighting controls. Design, commissioning, protocols, integration – pretty much anything you can think of related to lighting controls, we have a course for it.
To answer your question, our introduction course is the most popular; then design and networked lighting controls courses.
IESNYC: What’s your relationship to the IES mothership as a standards-writing body and ASHRAE code partner?
DILOUIE: The relationship between the IES and the Lighting Controls Association is long-standing and productive. We bring to the table an intense specialization in one part of lighting.
Ten years ago, or so, LCA began sponsoring the Lighting Control Innovation Award [as part of the IES Illumination Awards] to recognize lighting design projects that show prominent or exemplary use of lighting controls. And we've been publishing those Awards of Merit and Excellence on our website: dozens of projects.
We also partnered with IES on several venerable publications. We worked with the IES committee on the DG-29 publication on commissioning. We partnered on the Seminar-4 educational module, which is a comprehensive look at lighting controls, and on a version of LEM-7, lighting controls for energy management. We just did a post on the IES bookstore, highlighting all the great lighting control publications.
We’re working on a new memorandum of understanding with IES right now, and hoping to announce deeper collaboration soon.
Demystifying controls
IESNYC: As an industry we need to demystify controls in general. It’s not a sideline of architectural lighting design, but actually part and parcel of it. We have to get away from this idea that controls are this scary secret sauce. There are basic lighting principles that we expect everyone to know. The basic functions of a control system and how to describe it, at least preliminarily, should be part of that toolkit.
DILOUIE: That’s spot-on. Lighting controls are simply a layer of devices that enable lighting to be zoned to devices that react to various conditions to produce various outputs, notably switching and dimming. In recent years, we’ve seen these useful outputs expand to color tuning and data. By making the lighting system responsive, automated, connected, and robust, the building owner can maximize energy savings while gaining significant value that goes far beyond a direct return on investment.
When you add in data, things get super interesting in terms of what the lighting system can do. For instance, in a warehouse, capturing data on traffic patterns can save money and prevent injuries. The customer is getting value far beyond traditional energy ROI.
IESNYC: Yes! I think it was a mistake to hitch the lighting controls wagon to energy efficiency and LPD reductions. The consequence is that if it doesn't pencil out on energy, then it’s too expensive. Even with regards to circadian, that’s still a problem. And while there is a lot of interest in healthier indoor environments, there is no demand for paying twice as much for your lighting fixtures.
I was hoping that the recognized value added by LEDs would lead us to recognize other less-tangible embodied values. But it hasn’t.
DILOUIE: I think the challenge here has always been communicating a business case outside of saving energy. The same way it’s been challenging to communicate the value of quality lighting, outside of delivering lumens.
IESNYC: Absolutely. Somehow, we have to get better, as a collective, at talking to audiences outside the lighting industry.
LED revolution 2.0
DILOUIE: But I would argue that energy is actually still useful in getting us in the door to talk about controls, and then about the other value it can provide. We’re going into a decarbonization future. This is potentially a huge opportunity to realize what LEDs can do. Let’s return to some of those first-generation LED projects and propose quality lighting and advanced lighting controls.
IESNYC: I hope the second part of the revolution focuses on quality of life. Yes, let’s go back and redo those gen-one T-LED projects. What I'm hoping is that we will see owners enticing workers back to the office by renewing their focus on the visual environment.
In the same way that we now understand that indirect lighting is beneficial, I'm hoping that we'll start to see that other aspects of lighting quality add value to the built environment and push us towards decarbonization.
DILOUIE: Yes. The Holy Grail for this industry has always been educating the owner on the value of quality lighting, and then translating that into dollars and cents. Energy gets us in the door and opens up all sorts of possibilities. Education is the key for lighting professionals to maximize their value.
