13 minute read
The Thinker Underlying So Much in Lighting
By Thomas Paterson
We recently lost a hero of mine, Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024), a psychologist and Economics Nobel Prize winner. If you know who he is, you probably are aware of him from his incredibly popular Thinking, Fast and Slow.
My first awareness of his work was in the late 1990s as I studied artificial intelligence, as a support and backup to being a lighting designer. His work that drew my attention was on how people understand the value of loss, versus gain, and the fundamental irrationality of human thought. Indeed, if you asked psychologists, neurologists, philosophers and especially economists about Kahneman prior to Thinking, Fast and Slow, they would almost certainly have told you about the way Kahneman (and his collaborator Amos Tversky) rocked the foundations of economics when they demonstrated that humans are not rational thinkers, and therefore you can’t analyze economics simply by assuming everyone is rational.
But over the 25 years I’ve been in architectural lighting, Kahneman’s work has been ever more dominant in my thinking, and in ever wider aspects. I’d like to share five examples that perhaps can help you see where you can use him.
1. When negotiating professional fees, make the fee seem like an emphatic gain, rather than any kind of loss, let alone a big one!
Kahneman talks about the way one is more averse, more negative, about losing than gaining. You would appreciate being given ten dollars, sure. But if someone took ten dollars from you – that would make you upset, even angry. The same change in your net worth is so exaggerated in loss compared to gain. I won’t recapitulate all his experiments here, but I’m sure you understand that feeling!
What that means is that in negotiations, you do better to ensure that losses don’t feel like the subject of the debate. In a simple way, I tend to use a negotiating technique called "The Stretch and The Ask.”
Clients tend to want to hear about the company, what we do, what kind of homes or hotels or whatever, we work on. I’ll make sure I have a sense of the size of their project. Let’s say it’s a home. As we walk through the portfolio, I’ll look at a bigger, more complex project and comment on the approximate fee it would be if we were to propose it today. "For a house this size, our fee would typically be eighty to a hundred thousand". Ouch! But, the house isn’t like theirs, and it’s not a proposal for them, and it sure sounds like we do good work. They didn’t lose anything, though I bet they heard the number and got a little nervous.
Later, when they ask for a fee for their project, and it comes in at seventy thousand, they’re thrilled. They’re not losing seventy thousand – they’d priced in eighty or more in their minds, and now it’s ten thousand less! That’s a win, not a loss. And they’re getting all that we have to offer. The whole negotiation is starting with a win.
That doesn’t mean that they´re not going to negotiate - this isn’t a magic bullet. But they´re feeling like they’re negotiating in good will. Instead of losses that are both aversive AND overvalued, they’re starting from a win, or in fact, the relief of the pain of a loss. Phew.
2. Humans are bad at estimating, worse at evaluating the random errors in their estimation, and terrible at seeing their systematic errors.
In his last book, Noise, Kahneman explored the way statistical thinking fails in human brains, the ways estimates are misunderstood and how this has huge consequences for the world, society and fairness. I’d land it a bit more precisely for what we do. Lighting design fits into three areas of analysis – design thinking, estimation-based analysis and numerical analysis.
We all do a bit of photometry here and there. Some practices across everything they do, others on the challenging bits. Photometry seems very numerical and precise. But it’s not. With a well-modelled environment, any lighting design involving anything other than just direct light will be accurate MAYBE about ±20%.
But even then, there are systematic errors. The largest systematic error in my experience is in the maintenance factor, the most misunderstood and consciously manipulated value. Sales reps will often use a 90 or 95% maintenance factor, even for products with quoted L70 lives. That’s malpractice, because the manufacturer is telling you that, during the "effective life of the luminaire,” the maintained lumens of the luminaire will be at 70% of what the IES file says! Recommended practice from IES would say that in dirty environments, it might be as low as 57%. So, that’s a systematic bias from a sales rep trying to show their products as better than they really are – if this is life safety, their analysis will have you below code levels in months!
But what about random errors? The biggest one on those is finishes. What don’t we know when we do our photometry? The final finishes, quite often, nor their properties. How reflective is a concrete floor? What type of concrete? What polish will they finally pay for? How reflective is a desk? Now, what about how much paper will be on it? In that classroom, is that a nice white wall? Or will it be painted with a mural or pinned up with Mattias’s sketches of bunnies?
If one were to look at the best way to make for environmentally friendly, energy-efficient lighting, you wouldn’t focus on the luminaires, you’d focus on pale finishes, especially the floor, where light bounces back from first, in most environments.
What does Kahneman tell us? That we shouldn’t evaluate our own skills particularly highly when it comes to estimation – nor our ability to evaluate work. We’re easily fooled by apparent accuracy. Just because AGi is telling you that you have 4.35fc (down to the hundredth of an fc!), doesn’t mean you’re that accurate. And your ability to estimate it numerically is not going to validate that accurately either. There´s too much noise in the model – too many surfaces, missing furniture, bad estimates of maintenance factors. So, where life safety is involved (or where an inspector with a light meter might prevent your building opening), you need to build in buffers, and stack all the cards in favor of underestimating (and therefore overdesigning) light levels. At least for life safety. You should also pull apart the work of any photometry you receive, and check it for finishes and maintenance factor.
3. There is no such thing as creativity. But it can be taught. You can get good at doing it and teaching it.
This is not something that Kahneman said, but something I’ve come to understand out of his work, and I rather think that he would like the thinking behind it.
I do believe there are acts of creation, and greater skill levels in creating. But creativity? There’s no box you can put it in. The little seven year old girl who paints butterflies on everything is said to be creative by their primary school teacher, but it’s not what we mean in the professional world.
The brain, says Kahneman, operates at two different speeds, in two different response channels. There is the fast reaction mode. If I ask you who won the Super Bowl, most of you say the answer without thinking. Similarly if I ask you what four squared is. It’s fast, effortless, and it’s impossible to show your working. Your brain just did it below the conscious level. You can, of course, later justify the answer – "I saw the game!" – but that actually takes more thinking than the answer did.
Then there’s slow thinking. That’s effortful, tiring, complex, and prone to errors, but you can go back and fix them, using most of the thinking and just fixing the gaps. You can show your working, explain the elements of how you got there.
We think of "creativity" as being like the first. People "come up with" great ideas. And insofar as I’m willing to concede the appearance of there being such thing as creativity, I’d argue that Kahneman explains where that fast thinking comes from. It’s not some innate talent, some gift or other. It’s like most things that are in the fast-thinking category. It’s trained.
The thinking you do in the fast channel is thinking of things that you do endlessly, or repetitively, or have trained upon. It’s like muscle memory. You don’t think about putting on the indicator in your car before you take a corner, you just do it. You didn’t "just do it" for the first seventeen times you did it while learning to drive. You still forgot it while driving for the first few months. But now? Effortless.
You can say it’s well trained, and that’s true, but consider it a different way. Consider the "driving at junctions" module in your brain to be a skills set you’ve trained and automated. Automating it doesn’t mean part of your brain is no longer doing it. Automating means you’ve moved it from your conscious brain, where executive function and discipline make it hard and costly, but allow you to do novel things. Now it’s below your conscious level, where background processing quietly gets it done.
What we call creativity is really an assembly of dozens, hundreds, thousands of skills modules, all ticking away efficiently, passing ideas amongst themselves, evaluating, processing, improving, filtering and finally, promoting good ideas up and out of our mouths at meetings.
In lighting, I watch endlessly as the more skilled among us deliver ideas at the meeting table that seem to burst forth (come up with, overflow, etc.) with solutions and concepts that better solve the project than anything I can get to without hours of studying the plans, exploring the available products, a few test photometry models, and maybe a mockup or two. These ideas just burst forth instantly.
I don’t think they’re inspired by fairies, or that person was gifted with creative lighting skills at birth. One pattern is consistent. The people who come up with great ideas effortlessly and instantly have done the work to build out all the skills.
Sometimes it’s useful to validate an idea by seeing where it breaks down. What if that person lacks a module? We see this when designers cross from one field to another, or one context to another. Designers who might be brilliant at integrating ceilings in Europe come crashing down when they get to US projects, because the laws preclude so many of the methods used in Europe. It’s not that they can’t do it - but they’re back to working, with effort, through the new rules.
Kahneman showed us how all this works.
As people who build creative professionals, whether it’s building ourselves or those who follow us, we should learn from this. We need to help those who follow us build each module they’re going to need to have subconsciously, initially consciously. And it’ll be slow and effortful.
So what skills do you want someone to have? What modules? They’ll need to know about what products are out there, how things are maintained, what they cost, how budgets are analyzed, how architects respond to lighting design ideas, how a fixture is adjusted and locked...and on and on and on. As mentors, we should be looking for the modules our mentees lack and working out how to fill them.
Rest in peace, Daniel Kahneman.
4. Light switches should be operated with fast thinking.
A great control design operates entirely in the "thinking fast" part of our brains. If you have to come through the door, stop, turn around, look for the keypad, read the labels, try to understand what "North Cans" are, and then press a button in order to turn on the kitchen lights...design fail.
Great lighting control designs meet two criteria. First, they are discoverable – it’s easy to find where they are. Most of the time, this means you come through a doorway, opening the door with your left hand, while your right hand finds the keypad a consistent number of inches along the wall on the right, and always at the same height. It was easy to find, and it obviously belongs to this room.
The second is that they’re legible. And I don’t mean that they’re engraved with neat text. Indeed, if they’re legible, you may not need engraving at all!
Legible in this context means that the buttons or dials do what you think they should. I would posit in the simplest case, scenes, top to bottom, brightest to dimmest/off. I naturally hit the top button. I want it less bright, so I go down a button or two. I want it the lowest possible, so I hit the button at the bottom. It’s intuitive and conceptually legible. The scenes can each be beautifully balanced for needs at that general brightness.
As you look at your keypad planning and engraving, this should be your filter. Is this discoverable? Is it legible? Or to put it another way, can I operate this "thinking fast?”
And yes, there can be exceptions – in a garage, we’ll often add keys for putting the home into vacation mode, or in residence mode, etc. But don’t mix them with the fast-thinking keypads elsewhere!
5. Stop selling your clients (and yourself) on everything they CAN have. And stop "owning" the right to build your ideas before you’ve value engineered.
If there’s one thing that annoys me more than most, it’s designers bitching about the great ideas lost in VE, and resenting projects and clients for that.
First of all, separate yourself from believing an idea deserves to exist, until after you’ve found a way to make it exist IN THE REAL PROJECT and in the budget. That’ll save you a lot of pain when you have to VE out a project.
Clients and end users of spaces don’t need to know all the things they could have had, and feel like they’ve lost so much. Instead, design so what they receive at the end of the project feels like a great win. They’re excited for what they gained. Design is always about trade-offs, whether it’s balancing clean ceilings versus downlight task lighting, or the choice between a beautiful soft monotonic scheme or a rich, colorful, chaos of decorative objects in endless colors. Design is choice. If you feel pain for every loss, you’re in for a pretty miserable life.
And once a client has made a choice, celebrate all the good about that choice, and work to make it endlessly better. Why live in loss?
I trimmed this list down from dozens of places where Kahneman has affected my thinking, enhanced my design, enriched my business, empowered beautiful experience and onwards. The power of Kahneman underlies the projects I’m most proud of, and the building of people that is so much of my career.
For all that I feel his loss, I think the world should celebrate the depth of his thinking and its applicability to so many areas of life.
Start with Thinking, Fast and Slow. Slog through Noise (a MUCH harder read), but also read Steven Pinker and others in their summaries and analyses of Kahneman’s work. And to the many friends, colleagues, collaborators and mentees I’ve given Kahneman books to, I hope they’ve brought you insights that you, too, will pay forward.
