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John Bullock reports: according to my archives, I wrote nothing about ‘Human Centric Lighting’ before 2016 – and then, at the end of 2016, Lux Live presented Professor Russell Foster with the Lux Person of the Year Award – for his work on human centric lighting.
Prof. Foster heads up Circadian Neuroscience at Oxford University and is generally considered to be the go-to guy in the UK for the science behind what we no longer call ‘human centric lighting’, preferring the term Circadian Lighting. I’ve been fortunate to speak with him on several occasions, interviewing him for podcasts and even sharing a place around the project table with him since we first met back in 2016 – and things are looking very interesting . .not to say very different.
I’ve been working with Dr. Shelley James (Age of Light Innovations) on the specification of circadian lighting for care homes. As many of us have experienced, the typical state of lighting in most UK care homes borders on the abysmal, so to find a client who has a positive attitude not just to better lighting as an illuminant but towards lighting as providing a healthful intervention, provided the perfect opportunity to go back to the science and find out what’s happening in circadian research.
In May of this year, Shelley convened a symposium at Oxford University, inviting both proponents of circadian lighting design and care home management – and, as we were on his home turf, Prof.Russell Foster and members of his team. Where would we find the ‘common ground’?
Prof. Foster opened the proceedings with an overview of how the science has moved forward since early HCL years when it was all about melatonin and 480nm. How times change! Shelley and I are happy to share this introduction to a fascinating day of information-sharing – of which later . . .
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So: where does that leave us? Let’s face it, Russell Foster goes far beyond his brief of care home lighting. These latest findings change things for all of us. If you’ve been taking notes you should have a list of things that need to be talked about; a host of literature that needs to be reviewed – and a new approach to circadian lighting to be thought through.
And rest assured, we’ll be returning to this topic in the coming weeks.
