My good friend Clifton Stanley Lemon has been in touch, asking if we can let everyone know about a conference that’s happening in September 2022:
The question that everyone is asking is there in the title – are we creative lighting designers . . or just specifiers.
Clifton has been talking with Thomas Patterson. This is what they’ve come up with:
Exactly when did lighting designers consent to allow themselves to be referred to as “specifiers,” the ones who pick the lighting equipment? Other trades and disciplines don’t suffer this indignity: we don’t call artists “paint choosers,” interior designers “furniture pickers,” or mechanical engineers “pump, fan, and duct table monkeys.” “Specifier” indicates an inordinate attachment to equipment and technology, not to the more important process of why you need it in the first place, an essential human activity known as “design.” Let’s just refer to all lighting designers by what they actually do. The profession will be better off for it.
We have been having conversations that touch on this topic and several others, as preparation for the LightSPEC West conference in Los Angeles on September 21 and 22, at which Thomas is keynoting with a talk entitled “Craft and the Creativity Myth.” Here we introduce some of our discourse and discuss the terms that come into play when explaining and defining the practice of lighting design.
One meaning of the term “specifier,” from vocabulary com is “someone who draws up specifications giving details (as for obtaining a patent).” This harks back to the early days of electricity, when the bloodthirsty, contentious, competitive process of patenting and commercializing inventions by people like Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse had decisive outcomes on the future of technology. In fact, it is a way of addressing light though it is simply a matter of appropriately sizing grids of troffers.
Let’s abandon “specifier” in favor of “lighting designer.”
Lighting design is also not science. We use the results of other people’s scientific learning. But as a lighting designer, when did you last do a double-blind study to inform your design? Or discover a new principle of physics? Or publish a peer reviewed paper? When did you formulate a hypothesis, prove or disprove it, and submit that new knowledge to the review of your peers? We use evidence in making important design decisions, but that doesn’t make us scientists
According to one of the guiding lights of design in our culture, Charles Eames, design is “a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose.” The key ideas here are “plan” and “purpose.” Much of what people do when they design may indeed involve planning – although that’s often omitted in the rush to decorate – but typically fails because the necessary purpose is poorly defined, if it is defined at all. Design as a term ties many things together. It’s a fundamental human activity. “Designer” as a professional descriptor is well understood across many fields from graphic design to industrial design.
Lighting designers are creative, but do we have creativity? Does creativity really exist? Or is just a bullshit term that belies a fundamental misunderstanding of design practice and discipline?
We suggest that the creative process is generally misunderstood, confused with butterflies of inspiration, overrated, and carries a corrosive connotation of inherited merit vs learned skill.
So then what is it that lighting designers do? We believe that what designers practice is craft, the professional craft of design.
What defines craft? You’re probably thinking of activities like woodworking, decoupage, and making things with popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners, a la Hobby Lobby – unthinkably lowbrow vs intellectual and professional. For instance, several years ago, the California College of Arts and Crafts (which Clifton attended) became simply the California College of the Arts. Their curricula spans architecture, film, fashion, ceramics, comics, furniture, and game arts (and presumably not decoupage).
Craft is formed of a broad knowledge of the media with which one works, the way it will be used, its acquisition, and application. A great craftsman responds to a client’s needs to create something that serves their purpose, with grace, elegance, economy and often great beauty. What better description of the craft of lighting design?
Making craft implicit in design practice invites a bold realignment of entrenched hierarchical social values. The Old English word craeft signified an indefinable sense of knowledge, wisdom, and resourcefulness. Today it implies a deep holistic internalization of all the design skills necessary to deliver successful projects: research; defining purpose, problems, and intent; visualization; communication; collaboration; technical understanding; hands-on testing and verification; sourcing; budget management; problem solving; construction management; and post-occupancy assessment.
Thinking of lighting design as a craft enables a more accurate understanding of necessary skills to be assembled in the mind of a craftsperson in order to form a new mastery. It allows us to look at the professional development of practitioners in our industry as a studied process of building skills and people, of rounding out the areas they have not yet learned, and of working to bring craft to the collective product of our field.
Recognizing this also allows us to value people at each stage of their career, from apprentice through journeyman/woman to master. Each is a stage of life, with a different focus on personal development, application, and generosity in teaching to the following generation
Mr. Paterson’s keynote session on Wednesday, September 21 will explore a new perspective on lighting design and the craft needed to practice it. He’ll show how learning in a design practice can be facilitated through mentoring, transparency, continuing education, and direct jobsite experience. His firm Lux Populi, one of the top lighting firms in the world, encourages a culture of active listening, engagement with clients, experience-based problem solving, and collaboration with all other design and construction disciplines. Of course they choose fixtures, but they’re designers first and foremost
WARNING: this is NOT an online event. You need to be there. And ‘there’ is Los Angeles. It’s a long way away, possibly involving an airplane.
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Now – being in charge of this modest publication, I can give myself the Right to Reply . . . so here’s my view on what Thomas and Clifton are talking about.
Straight off the bat, I can say that I agree ABSOLUTELY with what’s being said here. There should never be any confusion that Lighting Design is a creative endeavour. Even if you’re lighting a warehouse, there is no excuse for not delivering a scheme that is elegant as well as being efficient. There is, after all, always someone around to appreciate the work that we do – else why do it?
But . . .
If the lighting designer does not ‘own’ the specification, then who does. If we allow someone else – let’s say, ooh, I don’t know . . . an electrician maybe – to control the specification, then how do we know what might turn up at the end of the day?
Our clients engage us to produce a finished, working lighting scheme – not to come up with fancy ideas that we then hand over to someone else who has little or no understanding of what we’re trying to do.
Back in 2009, in the ‘Switched On’ magazine by the Electrical Safety Council, there was an article titled ‘Electrical Installation Work: Who is the Designer? I keep this document around to wave it at electricians when they try to shift responsibility of the electrical design onto me.
This is a kind of reverse ferret:
In this argument I point out that I am naught but a ‘specifier’. The designer must be a competent person in the electrical arts – and that’s not the lighting designer . . . er, specifier. The tricksy thing here is that the role of ‘lighting designer’ is still relatively rare, so lighting specification falls within the electrical design. SO -in order to maintain any semblence of control we MUST embrace, and come to love, that specifier role.
What I’m getting at is that we, as lighting designers, need to work bot ends of this one. Of course we have to express our creative selves -otherwise what are we for – but we must also seize the role of specifier and not be afraid to use that term when the situation calls for it.
And that’s all I have to say on the matter . . . maybe.