The stated aim of Futurebuild is “to explore and tackle the biggest challenges impacting the built environment and beyond. In fact, our new identity is a reaffirmation of our commitment to championing true innovation and sustainability across the built environment.” But from what I’ve seen at ExCel, there are fewer than half a dozen lighting companies marching under that worthy banner.
The Futurebuild organisers are trying to do something around the sustainability agenda across the entire construction sector. Its not just about fifty different things do do with timber, or the many ways you can push air down a pipe, it’s about the how and the why we could be designing and building differently. Those two words ‘innovation’ and ‘sustainability’ in their stated aims suggest that there may be better ways of delivering our built environment.. The not-quite-a-handful of lighting companies exhibiting at Futurebuild seem to have got that broader picture.
Meanwhile, here in the lighting industry, we’re still fighting old battles, congratulating ourselves for sorting out the old enemy that is energy consumption. We haven’t actually saved any energy, of course. At the end of the day, the economic model demands that we sell more lights. Individual projects may report impressive energy savings but the global picture suggests that we’re just finding more things to with LEDs; the Jevons Paradox still applies.
One of the complaints that I hear again and again from lighting manufacturers is that dedicated lighting exhibitions are monocoque affairs; self-serving displays, little more than a gathering of lighting folk to impress other lighting folk. And, to a greater or lesser degree, that is true, particularly at the top of the food-chain. Frankfurt Licht+Bild sucks so much from marketing budgets that little is left for more regional activity. Companies exhibit there because they ‘have to be seen’ – but by whom? Are we suggesting that the millions of Euros spent on that event couldn’t be more creatively spent across the trading regions? Are lighting companies really relying on one week in Frankfurt every two years for its business? Of course not; this is just willy-waving on a grand scale (gender specificity intended).
If lighting companies want to display their wares outside of the lighting bubble then events like Futurebuild are surely one way to go; coming together under a banner that supports improvements in architectural design, working alongside all those other sectors who help to create the built environment, is surely what we’re about. Isn’t that what we’re saying we want?