Luxbox launch: So - what’s really in the box?
We search around for what’s available; we choose the thing that we trust will do the job; we open the box . . . and we cross our fingers.
We search around for what’s available; we choose the thing that we trust will do the job; we open the box . . . and we cross our fingers.
The railways are changing and lighting is at the forefront of the revolution, at this year’s Lux Lighting for Rail Conference, we intend to tell you the best ways to stay ahead of the curve. From the responsibilities of drivers to the standards that govern the industry, nothing is what it used to be. The challenges that rail operators face are different too. Light pollution, suicide prevention, energy reduction and easing the pressures on drivers are all issues that need to be tackled.
Our high streets are changing, and this is happening all around the world. The change is being driven by adventurous retailers, their outlets being of all and any size, wishing to create a common visual appearance and a common customer experience from the streets of New York to the streets of Mumbai. If you walk into a store you can feel The Brand. Driven by Brand Managers and Marketers, it falls to the Design team to create a global identity, capable of overcoming the challenges of making the approved design ‘fit’ into physical space all over the world.
The Dutch island of Texel aims to become fully energy neutral by 2020 and smart lighting is helping to get the job done.
It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, if you have produced a lighting specification it will be at risk from the time that it leaves your desk. Sometimes it’s the contractor trying to earn a bit more money by attempting a ‘like-for-like’ swap and hoping that no one notices. But, it can also be a cultural issue that goes as far as the client’s desk, where everyone assumes that everyone else is trying to pull a fast one. Here are some of the processes that can be put in place to help protect the design specification once it becomes part of the contract documentation and is outside of the specifier’s control.
A good designer will always have one eye on the prospect of a value engineering exercise coming along at the end of their design process, so its best to put a costing strategy in place at the very beginning of the exercise.
Armed robbers who shot dead a rich insurance executive in his luxury rural Dorset home hid in wait for the streetlights to go out before deciding to strike. A number of cash strapped councils have opted to switch street lights off in rural areas, during the middle of the night, in order to cut down on costs.
Could LED make pesticides in farming a thing of the past? PLUS: Commuters rebel against lighting upgrade on Washington Metro. AND: US Navy buys American when it comes to lighting. Lux Today 3 May 2017.
The arrival of the LED has brought with it a whole slew of new companies and individuals with little or no history in the lighting industry. It’s also brought a lot of uncertainty, the lighting conventions that we grew up with have been mostly abandoned and have been replaced with . . . very little. There are no performance standards for LED product and that has left the specifier open to all kinds of deception. So who do we trust?
The Moscow Metro has a launched a new generation of trains featuring LED lighting that adapts to the time of day. With typical Russian understatement the Moscow authorities are labelling the new vehicles as the ‘the best metro trains in the world.’
Emergency lighting is critical. It has to be done right and in accordance with a whole stream of regulations and laws. Amid this changing and quickly altering landscape it is easy to come adrift or stray from the correct path.
The Lighting Industry Association has got the green light to cast its eye over the industry and root out sub-standard luminaires , in an attempt to remove the blight of compliance dodgers.
President Donald Trump is laying down the law when it comes to ensuring that the federal government, which is one of the largest employers in the world, buys American. This means it’s boom time for US manufacturers when it comes to securing major lighting contracts.
Washington DC, home to the American power elite, has seen many controversies rise and fall, the latest, however, doesn’t involve presidents or congressmen, but the new LED lighting on the city’s Metro network. And it's not only commuters that are enraged, lighting designers with any sense of history are cringing at the network's tinkering with an iconic, if unusual, scheme.
Research is proving that light produced by LEDs has the ability to speed up plant growth and improve the taste of fruit and vegetables. However, researchers in the United States are also proving that LED light is able to reduce disease in plants, a discovery that could, ultimately, lead to the redundancy of expensive and unpopular pesticides. Lux caught up with Jaimin Patel, a plant pathologist at the Lighting Research Center of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, to find out more.
A good value proposition challenges the way that we see the world. It asks questions and suggests that there may be a different way of doing things. New ways of working often derive from implementing a new piece of technology combined with an attractive price structure, but it is rare for a value proposition to go to the heart of product design and suggest that the shape of the light fixtures that we make could look different. Lux's Applications Editor, John Bullock, heads into new territory in his latest Value Proposition.