After attending LEDucation, LightFair, IES25: The Lighting Conference, ArchLIGHT Summit, and IALD Enlightened Americas last year, I noticed a troubling consistency: the same conversations, frustrations, and inertia. Here are five provocations—not to stir drama, but to push the industry forward. These viewpoints come from seven years as a lighting designer in an architecture and engineering firm and two years engaging with players across the industry through LightStanza.
#1: Mad at Reps Taking Your Work?
Look in the Mirror
The representative-“stealing-work”-from-lighting-designer-debate is stale. If reps are winning work, it’s not theft—it’s relationship-building. Lighting designers need to stop blaming reps and start asking: What are they doing better? Rep agencies are businesses just like lighting design firms; they have bills to pay and it’s not in their interest to turn clients away. Can you imagine another business insisting you turn one of your customers away? Madness. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cheaper to use a lighting designer, and I want lighting designers to be doing a majority—if not all—the project work out there, but I’m exceedingly frustrated that lighting designers insist on blaming reps rather than asking themselves how they can improve their business practices to compete. What are reps doing better than lighting designers? If your answer comes down to “free design,” you are kidding yourself. That design isn’t free—it’s just not a line item. The issue is that lighting designers do not do a good job of showing potential clients the true cost benefits of hiring a lighting designer.
#2: A Proposed Solution to Transparent Pricing and Rep Compensation
Every year, we talk about transparency in pricing and rep compensation, and every year nothing changes. The current system is misaligned with how design net works operate. How were individual reps paid just a couple of decades ago? A commission-based structure. What about today? More commonly, individual reps earn a salary with additional compensation based on sales performance. Why has this change occurred? Presumably, because that compensation structure works better. Why not take that to the rep firm level? Eliminate commission at all levels, with manufacturers instead paying rep agencies a flat annual fee for their services. This approach could open lanes for transparent pricing and reduce barriers for collaboration between agencies that are supporting projects across various cities. Reps can negotiate their price based on their performance (sales, collaboration, support) from the previous year. I’m not saying this is the perfect solution, and it’s impossible for me to understand the full ramifications of this proposed system, but it’s a thought toward change and trying to move the conversation instead of endlessly circling.
#3: Lighting User Experience (LUXE) Proposed Lighting Standard to Complement LEED and WELL
Why shouldn’t there be a design standard similar to LEED and WELL but only for lighting? I’m sure this idea has been tossed out by many in the industry. Let energy-efficiency codes handle lighting power density but allow this standard to focus on the interaction between electric lighting, daylighting, and controls and their impact on human occupants as well as their effect on the environment. Lighting is inherently complex. The proposed standard would address all the complicated and interconnected elements of lighting such as circadian lighting, glare, interaction, and sustainability. If you’re interested in shaping this standard, reach out. Let’s build a framework that reflects how lighting impacts people and our planet.
#4: Where Are the Dreamers and Visionaries?
I was gravely disappointed with the AI offerings across all the shows. Most of them were not practical and resembled therapy sessions: spaces to air concerns about AI rather than inspire innovation. Where were the sessions to inspire us to dream of all the things we will do with AI? If we don’t dream it, how will it be built? AI is here and it’s not going away. While a healthy amount of fear is useful, there needs to be a balance with inspiration and mapping out how AI can be useful. There are a few early (tight-lipped) adopters that are using it effectively and beneficially. There are several software companies and start-ups that are developing tools specifically for the lighting industry. We need to dream bigger—or risk watching someone else build the future without us.
#5: AI Draws from History; Humans Envision What’s Ahead
There’s a persistent anxiety in the lighting world that AI will replace designers. I don’t buy it, not because AI isn’t powerful, but because our data isn’t good enough to train it on. Think of all the projects you’ve worked on. How many of those projects were ideal for the electrical design, daylighting, and control design? Oh, yes, and balancing sustainability, value for the price, schedule, and collaboration with other trades? I’m sure you have quite a few projects that are ideal in one to three of these domains, but all of them? I’m presuming there is a very small quantity of the kind of projects on which we would all be comfortable training AI.
AI is only as strong as the data it’s trained on. We could absolutely train AI on all the data we currently have, but I strongly suspect the outcomes will be poor. We could feed AI every photometric file, control spec, and daylight simulation and still end up with garbage outputs. Why? Because the design intent, trade-offs, and human judgment do not live in the data. All those intents that got thrownout the window due to value engineering or other questionable project decisions lead to a poor data set.
We should leverage AI to make our designs exponentially better. Lighting is complex, and lighting design spans multiple domains. If your design involves daylighting, electric lighting, or controls, it inherently touches all three—whether you realize it or not. AI can help us address all of them, all the time. While doing so, we must also prioritize sustainability and the well-being of both occupants and the environment. AI can simulate outcomes faster, identify inconsistencies, and optimize for multiple objectives. It’s time to stop viewing AI as an automation tool and start embracing it as an augmentation tool. AI won’t replace lighting designers, but it will reveal gaps in our process, documentation, and value proposition. If we want AI to reflect excellence, we need to start designing like it.
It’s Time to Build, Not Bicker
The last thing this industry needs more of is drama. Drama is not my intention; I want to push us toward a future where lighting design reflects the complexity of our craft, the creativity of those who shape it, and the outcomes that match the intensity of our passion. To do so, we need to ignite something more than discussion, we require deliberate stepsforward. Transparent pricing, new public facing standards to promote quality lighting, and a re-imagined role for AI are not isolated debates. They are interconnected shifts that demand new ways of thinking and working. If we want lighting to matter in the next decade, we cannot wait for change to happen to us; we must build it ourselves. The industry will only evolve if we stop circling the same frustrations and start daring to act, together, with vision, conviction, and urgency.