The Future of Lighting Design: a dialogue with AI beyond Lighting Design Following his stellar keynote presentation at IALD Enlighten Europe, Marco Bevolo, Ph.D., Adj. Prof. Design Futures, World University of Design, India, and Dennis Draeger, MTech, Research Director, Shaping Tomorrow, UK / NZ, share more of their findings on the subject of AI and lighting design.
COMMENT MARCO BEVOLO & DENNIS DRAEGER
What is the future ahead of us all? Historically, this key question pertained to the work of very different people, from shamans and fortune tellers to statistic scientists and professional trend watchers. However, we, the authors, have operated in foresight – the consulting practice focusing on business advisory – and futures research – the multidisciplinary body of academic studies providing structure and validity to the field, for a few decades combined. This is why we gladly accepted the challenge to explore educated answers to the question: “What is the future of lighting design, both in terms of evolving trends as well as in terms of potential disruptions?”, when received from Martin Lupton on behalf of the IALD (International Association of Lighting Designers) for its Enlighten Europe 2024 conference keynote. For this purpose, we combined our different theoretical and methodological backgrounds, from participatory design to computer sciences, in an experimental hybrid human-LLM machine research process with fast interaction loops between prompts and trend analysis and clustering. The outcome was the product of an organic approach, based on Trained Judgement – the intuitive design approach formalised by Ben van Berkel since the late 1990s. Additionally, informal dialogues with thought leaders and industry seniors played a key role in calibrating our findings. Our four key takeaways are: - “visuals”, including the selection enriching this article, were generated by AI in response to the challenge of visualising the future of lighting design; - “signals”, or single phenomena selected from the 100+ hypotheses sketched by Generative AI; - “trends”, or clustered signals, forming a coherent tension towards what is next in lighting design; - an AI-based update of the 2014 city.people.light “matrix”, originally developed by Philips Design for Philips Lighting, now Signify. Therefore, this article shifts from lighting design to
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socio-cultural trends beyond light and lighting, with cities as a contextual reference. Ultimately, our study suggests that the future of lighting design might be challenged by paradigm-changing technologies and sensibilities, in a radically redefining context from natural shadows or “off-the-grid” natural materials, to game design and the implant of chips directly into the human brain. In this challenging context, lighting design will seek new business models and lighting designers will be challenged to find new roles in new portfolios.
Signal Clustering: Exploring the Tensions
As we clustered a series of AI-generated signals into trends, we uncovered several tensions, or potential paradoxes, within the results. These seeming tensions imply scenarios where the future of lighting, lighting design, and light for humans and planet may develop as time progresses: Design service provision versus innovative consulting business models The future of lighting design as a business enterprise was scarcely reported by our Generative AI engagement. Its output focused on the immense impact that Generative AI itself is going to have on the sector (as in any sector) and included references to Circular Economy or Lighting Design as a subscription service. Conversations with thought leaders provided a more textured outcome, including: the expected (further) consolidation of lighting design functions into major corporations or creative industry firms; the fractional nature of consulting in the future, with very limited assignments instead of interim roles or major projects as an emerging business model; and hygiene factors like the ability to build cross industry alliances, to navigate business networks, and, of course, to further compress costs.