RESIDENTIAL
Transforming Client Reactions Through Language By DAVID K. WARFEL
Have you ever had a client that, despite your best advice, chose not to spend enough money to get really good lighting in their home or workplace? Have you ever had a client eliminate ambient light layers in their kitchen or cut down the accent lighting in a conference room? The problem may not be the client or your design. The problem may be the words you use. In a few weeks, I will be guest-lecturing in several lighting classes at University of Colorado in Boulder. Beforehand, each student will be reading about Richard Kelly’s “lightplay” from Jason Livingston’s Designing with Light: The Art, Science, and Practice of Architectural Lighting Design, and it will be my task to contextualize the basic functions of lighting design and, I hope, provide practical advice they can use in their coursework and careers. At first glance this can seem like a tall order, to stand in the shadow of lighting legends like Kelly, to find something useful to say in seventy-five minutes or less. Many of us in the lighting design profession have heard of Kelly’s focal glow, ambient luminescence, and play of brilliants. I was taught that the three layers of light required for good lighting
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were a variation of these, labeled task, ambient, and accent lighting. For a decade or two, I carried these layers from client to client, presenting them as a kind of holy grail, sacred and important. Six or seven years ago, I came to an uncomfortable yet surprisingly energizing conclusion: Our clients do not care about task, ambient, and accent. Our clients do not understand what play of brilliants or ambient luminescence mean. And that should be okay. Lighting designers need a kind of shorthand to communicate with each other – call it a secret professional language, so that we can efficiently transfer knowledge, communicate with teams, and get the job done. There is nothing wrong with subscribing to Richard Kelly’s language or the task, ambient, accent derivatives, so long as we recognize that these words do little to communicate the absolute necessity and value of light to an ordinary citizen like our client. Here is what I will say to the classes at UC Boulder: Learn and use what Jason Livingston and Richard Kelly provide to build