August 7, 2008..."Lighting designers are generally jaded," quipped a lighting designer friend. "We're all about creativity, but when it comes to something new, like LEDs and solid state lighting, it's easiest just to say, 'That stuff doesn't work,' and be done with it for now." Well, there's one opinion. Then, just a few hours later, another friend who is more involved on the product side of LED-based lighting was relating a challenging day that had just passed. "The architects and lighting engineers were just flat excited about what LED-lighting looks like it can do, then in strolls the lighting designer and pooh-poohs it as inferior quality light that's unreliable... and then I showed them the current generation of fixture and their jaws dropped at the quality of what they were seeing." In this case, the choice of fixtures wasn't something randomly selected out the many offerings now appearing on the market. It was chosen after a pretty thorough qualification effort that was based on more than the numbers and included subjective light quality, ease of installation, ruggedness of the construction and warranty. Along with that came a look at internal design issues such as the types of LEDs used, how the heat is managed and how light output is maintained over the life of the product. Those are the issues that separate "real products" from the "knock-offs" and, if I may be blunt for a moment, from the junk out there. So what's the challenge in communicating to the lighting designers what the quality leaders in the LED lighting industry already know?

To answer that, it will probably help to understand at least one take on where they're coming from in all this. For decades, lighting designers had worked with a known and useful set of lighting elements. I can't comment much on life before today's fluorescent tube, but it's not hard to imagine designers reluctantly agreeing that as the quality improved, it was useful to save as much energy as one does in the comparison between fluorescent or HID technologies and standard incandescent solutions. 8-10 times less energy consumption is big enough to make it an acceptable part of "the design palette", given how appreciative the client must have been when presented with operational cost savings that translated into. Color and ambience were the role of incandescent, or perhaps even some neon components in the mix. All was well, and our creative lighting artists could ply their trade relatively unimpeded.

Then along came the "green" wave that took energy conservation and awareness to a new level. For a while, it meant a few more efficient sources, some more natural lighting and some education to be able to understand and design to efficiency and sustainability specifications like LEED and California's Title 24. However, they were caught in a trend that was incrementally restricting the designer's choices, and making it progressively more difficult for designers to practice their art. Things continued to get more restrictive, perhaps hitting the real crescendo with the whole "ban the bulb" moves, starting in California and quickly spreading as a governmental darling across the world. "We'll just force them to use better technologies," say the legislators and environmental oracles. But what technologies were better? The designers were staring at a palette consisting of fluorescent tubes, gymnasium lights and mercury-vapor street lamps (the latter being the greatest conundrum... great efficiency, color rendering of minus something, and loaded with a heavy metal that gets installed in a Midwestern park and ends up in your can of tuna fish). The lighting designers were being left with 3 crayons and a paper napkin and being told they were still expected to come up with art still worthy of hanging next to the Mona Lisa. After a few US postal workers over a period of years had some issues with their workplaces and guns, "going postal" became part of the vernacular for "losing it to the extreme". In retrospect, the lighting design community showed incredible restraint in not adding "going LD" and conjuring the image of a crazed gunman with a tie-dyed head scarf blasting away at fixtures in their local art gallery or Neiman Marcus.

"But worry not! LEDs are here to save the day!" they are told. Energy efficient, great color capabilities, and all the benefits of semiconductor technology that changed the world with computers and created the internet! Unfortunately, that wasn't today, but 2-3 years ago... They weren't even working very well for flashlights, much less as the primary light source for a commercial or public project. Lighting designers were probably excited too, but without the tools to evaluate and substantiate the claims, they tried a few fixtures and found them lacking. "The next generation will be brighter, will have less color shift over time, and will last those 50,000 hours we're claiming," came the LED industry response. And while the underlying LED technology continued to do just that, the translation into a fixture was still lagging, except in a few rare cases. Still without the tools, a few of the sharpest lighting designers created their own knowledge base, likely by persistence and a bit of luck, and showed some success that was virtually impossible to recreate for someone without the same experience. "Use LEDs!" said many architects and lighting engineers. "They don't work for what we're wanting to do," insist the lighting designers. "We hear they're working pretty well," say the project managers. "Show me the ones that do," answer the designers. "They all look like they should work, but it seems random, and given their prices, are you willing to explain to Mr. Trump why the building needs a million dollar lighting refit in a year if they don't?" Given the context of the last decade or so, I've come to the conclusion that their skepticism is fully understandable, but only justified by the fact that they don't have the knowledge tools they need to identify the current generation of winning solutions.

The near-term realizable promise of LED lighting is that it is the one tool that will not only restore their full range of creative options, but that will also give them a bigger canvas to paint on than they ever had before. The reality is that there are good solid state lighting solutions that are available today for a rapidly escalating number of applications. The lighting design innovators realize that, and are investing in their own knowledge-base, and relationships, to effectively pick those winners. The right knowledge-base will allow designers, specifiers and other decision makers to know what they're looking at, what kind of subjective evaluations to apply, and what questions to ask to assure themselves that what they see is what they'll get, both today and down the road a few years. That's the point of the SSLdesign Summit, fast-approaching August 26-27, and being held just across the river from Manhattan. To quickly highlight, our co-chairs, Jeff Miller, President of the International Association of Lighting Designers, will share his experiences and insights into what the lighting design community needs, and needs to know, to encourage SSL adoption while Govi Rao, CEO of Lighting Sciences, will be able to share the current and coming reality of a market with modular solutions that will enable the luminaire manufacturers to better meet those needs. We're also pleased to welcome as a keynote speaker Matthew Tanteri, award winning principal of Tanteri & Associates, who will share insights into the success of media facades, including his highly regarded LED implementations on the Chanel buildings in Asia. Given that we're only a short time away from effectivity of the commercial and industrial Energy Star program, every lighting and sustainability specifier and decision maker will need to understand how SSL-based lighting projects can qualify for what is likely to be hundreds of millions of dollars in program incentives. To that end, the Summit is welcoming Jeff McCullough, who is with the Energy and Environment Directorate of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and whose ability to communicate the key points of the SSL program can save someone a day or more of their own research time to fully grasp what they need to know. For some global thinking, Jed Dorsheimer, Principal - Equity Research, Sustainability with Canaccord Adams will translate the knowledge from his research practice, as well as his time spent as a lighting advisor to the William J. Clinton Foundation's Climate Initiative, into a practical understanding of why we, not just investors, all need to care about solid state lighting.

Those equipped with the information, as well as the understanding of how to sort and distill it, are accomplishing things now that could only be dreamed of just 5 years ago, and the pace is only accelerating from here. The Summit is here to bring the rest of us along so we can catch this train before it gets too far out of the station.