Lighting is More Sustainable Than Ever, but We Can Still Do More
This week I was fortunate enough to be able to give a guest lecture at Parsons on the subject of sustainability. My co-guest lecturer and friend Leela Shanker had the brilliant idea of discussing this topic through the framing device of values.
The students didn’t hesitate to name the values they thought were important to making good design. They included concepts like equity, service to the community, circularity, and minimal/positive impact on the planet.
When I was starting out in this industry, the old guard of designers didn’t think sustainability was our responsibility. My oh my, how things have changed. The generation of designers I came up with care about their projects' impact on the world. Sustainability was a value, but it was only just starting to become actionable. The coming generation now assumes sustainable thinking - it is their mental preset.
And so, lighting has become about more than light.
“We overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in ten.”
When I was a twenty-something-year-old, I wanted everything to change right away. I was impatient for LED to change the world.
This guest lecture experience made me realize just how far things have come. We have so far to go, but I’m old enough to have used thousands of watts of electricity to light little stages in Manhattan. We take for granted how much wattage we’ve already taken off the grid by embracing LED. But there’s more to do. More on efficacy, more on economical design, more on material sustainability. We’ll get there.
