Soft skills are essential in an ever-evolving market Last year felt like a very eventful trip around the Sun (in ways both positive and negative), but 2025 seems like a blank slate in some ways. This is our 12th year examining the jobs and hiring market for lighting, electrical, and controls, and for better or…

Enhancing the guest experience in hospitality spaces Hospitality spaces have many areas that are diverse, with unique comfort, safety, performance and ambiance needs for their employees and guests. As a result, effective lighting is essential for hospitality applications such that many ownership groups and property operators are mandating that a lighting designer be included on…

The Lighting Industry Association (LIA), dedicated to lighting in Europe, has announced new courses to launch in January 2025: Identify And Understand Your Customers and Planning, Presenting, and Closing, as well as a Combined Course Package. The courses are designed for sales specialists and provide participants with technical knowledge and strategic selling strategies. The flexible,…

The National Lighting Bureau’s (NLB’s) call for entries for the 6th-annual Tesla Awards, recognizing excellence in lighting projects that illustrate the value of lighting via promotion of health and wellness, positive environmental impact, and other categories, continues through January 20, 2025. The program seeks projects that provide a future guide for other industry professionals facing…

Research and Markets has published a new analysis, Commercial Lighting Market by Offering, Installation Type, Communication Technology, End-use Application, End-user Global Forecast 2025-2030. The 187-page document covers key factors driving the growth of the commercial lighting market sector (including fixtures for hospitality, retail, workspaces, and more applications), which reached over $17 billion in 2024 and…

Walt Disney Imagineering continues to reanimate haunted attractions As each October approaches, there’s a proliferation of haunted attractions designed to scare the bejesus out of willing visitors. “Get out!” is often the unwelcoming operative term in such environments, followed by  visitors’ screaming and scrambling out of danger. But for more than 55 years, one iteration…

Defining goals and boundaries for the use of AI Ten years ago, the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) was something that you might see in a dystopian sci-fi movie or hear tech executives pontificate on as they sold you software. From the conceptualization of AI in the 1950s, AI always felt like a distant future…

“The Legend of Luna” extends Great Wolf Resorts’ storytelling canvas Picture a cozy living room inside a log cabin on a chilly night. The fireplace is softly glowing, a dark-wood mantel is adorned with treasures from the forest, candles flicker in the windowsills, and you’re reading a fairytale aloud from a worn, leather-bound book. Now,…

  For a third time, light lovers on social media answered LD+A’s call for their best images of natural light phenomena. As always, the submissions the editors received did not disappoint. See images from around the world by (top row from left to right) Kevin Cleary, Ilana Zucker-Scharff, Pamela Micks; (middle row) Ardra Zinkon, Karla…

Articulate your incentives and benefits Things have obviously changed significantly in employment trends since 2020, so I thought I would take a “recruiter’s perspective” look at the numbers based on my placements in the lighting industry over the last 16 years to provide some concrete evidence. As suspected, since 2020, relocations have decreased and remote…

Securing the Future of Smart Buildings with Cybersecurity Skills As buildings become increasingly integrated with advanced control technologies, cybersecurity concerns have risen significantly. This is particularly true for networked lighting systems, as cybersecurity has become more important due to their growing integration with IP networks and other building IT and operational technology (OT) systems. Historically,…

Illumination allows for versatility in a California gallery The 2023 IES Illumination Award of Merit-recipient Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco, CA, holds inside its doors a range of design-based exhibits to awe and inspire. Visitors can take a closer look at examples of innovation from 3-D-printed stop-motion puppets from animation company LAIKA to hydrogen-powered drone…

A peek at future IES DEIR Committee initiatives Since the inception of the IES Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Respect (DEIR) Committee in 2021, we have set annual agendas and goals while always keeping our core mission forefront: to be an advisory committee to the Board and the Society on matters of DEI. Several of our…

Twice a year, each January and June, Dallas Market Center hosts the largest residential lighting show in the Western Hemisphere. Lightovation offers 1 million square feet of permanent exhibits encompassing all categories of lighting for home and hospitality environments. This includes decorative and architectural fixtures, interior and exterior lighting, light sources and controls. The next…

The winners of the first-annual Beacon Awards, presented by DLFNY, honoring outstanding achievements in lighting design in 2024, were announced at a ceremony in October at Sony Hall in New York City. The winners of the categories, Commercial, Exterior, History/Cultural, Hospitality/Retail, New York Project, Product Design Innovation and Residential, are as follows, respectively: The Spiral…