Three Lighting Things to Look For in 2020

Happy New Year!

Right now the thing I’m really looking forward to in 2020 is how cool sounding a year it is. Just say it outlaid “twenty-twenty” it really does roll of the tongue. It’s also optimal for hindsight jokes.

All kidding aside, I’m looking forward to the new year, not really because it’s a “fresh start,” but because it’s a continuation of so many great projects and relationships from 2019. There are definitely some trends from 2019 that I think will continue into next year.

Value Engineering will continue to be a major design consideration

As I’ve previously written, projects are now in a state of nearly constant value engineering. I don’t see that trend changing. What I do see is designers responding to price challenges more directly and earlier in the process. What has me curious is how designers will push back on their ever-shrinking budgets, and even more importantly how will manufacturers justify any kind of premium pricing in a race-to-the-bottom climate.

Controls will become more distributed.

PoE is the trendy topic of the moment when it comes to lighting controls. Personally, I have reservations but that’s a topic for a different post. What I think PoE will do (even if it’s not widely adopted) is push other controls vendors to further distribute their systems. I can’t see a future where centralized panels and long home runs continue to make sense, even in new construction. In a world where you can talk to Alexa and have your lights change color at home, I think end users and owners will be looking for a commercial/enterprise level solution with that kind of simplicity. In the short term, that probably means room controllers and basic distributed systems. I also think it’s time to make a more spirited argument for true wireless solutions (probably something else to discuss in a new post).

Projects will continue to race at Autobahn speeds

As the price per square foot of property in major cities continues to go up, owners have less and less tolerance for time they can’t charge for. So the speed with which design teams and contractors must work to realize projects continues to shrink. Design/build is become more and more the norm, but it will lead to cost overruns and budgets swelling. On my side of the fence, that means being as responsive as possible, but I wonder how much faster as an industry we can go without the quality of the work suffering?

I can’t express how grateful I am to work with so many great people both at SDA and the offices I service. What are you looking forward to in 2020? What trends will prove powerful and which might be challenges?