Pete and I get together whenever we can – ask the same questions and usually get the same answers. The issue of international exhibitions comes up on a regular basis. Now, Pete and I see almost see eye-to-eye on this one; we both think that the mega-exhibition is a lumbering dinosaur that needs putting out of everyone’s misery; that there is no longer a place for shows like Frankfurt L+B; it’s unsustainable energy cost / carbon emissions and the ludicrous cost to the exhibiting companies
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Anyway – here we are a few months down the line from Frankfurt and Pete is comparing this year’s visit to his first Light+Building review in 2012.
Over to you Pete!
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TEN YEARS AFTER!
(ed: This should really come with a Woodstock soundtrack. Oh – hang on – here’s one now!)
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Same old Frankfurt, same old route from the backstreet hotel to the Messe, familiar iron man with hammer and the walk up the steps to the City Entrance. Same old trade show smell in the air, queueing to get in on the ground floor only to be squeezed into the single escalator.
Ten years later what’s changed? I’ve changed. My job has changed, independent rather than corporate. The world has seriously changed. Somehow it’s not the same old Frankfurt. The city centre itself felt a bit edgy, a bit chaotic, beautiful high-rise steel and glass architecture right next to beautiful boarded-up and derelict architecture from previous centuries. I hurried past O’Reilly’s and didn’t go in.
I wasn’t here for the city experience, I was here to take the pulse of the lighting industry. How are we doing these days? Is there still a place for massive trade shows like this, following recent global events? I didn’t make it to the 2022 version of L+B, the last time I was here was 2018. I heard that I didn’t miss much at the 2022 edition, not surprisingly. In the meantime Light22 and Light23 shows caused a lovely stir, as a UK industry we seemed really happy to be re-convening and sharing our ideas, products and solutions.
I only had Sunday afternoon, Monday and Tuesday morning and at the end of it I’d managed 40km walking. I’m not reviewing anything at a technical or even product level, I was looking for the trends.
The first obvious and continuing trend is sustainability, circularity and minimising waste, re-use rather than recycle. When I joined Philips Lighting in 2011 the global CEO was talking about a circular economy. I’d never heard of that before. No-one knew what it was really in lighting back then, not a lot of people cared. Not a lot of people even wanted LED back then, fixture manufacturers had order books full of fluorescent and HID. We were happy to chuck away our tubes and re-lamp. If they got recycled we felt a bit better about it; that was it. I’m just a regular chap, I’m no evangelist, I’ve grown up with the word ‘thrift’ that was explained to me when I was 11. That means I fully approve of our efforts as an industry to minimise waste, to me it’s common sense and a way of life. Sadly it becomes a marketing tool and the South Pole offsetting projects debacle, for example, is such a shame. A shame for the communities that perhaps didn’t benefit from it, I mean.
Miniaturisation is still a thing! I saw some lovely tiny linears and spots, amazing optics where the light cut-off is so good and the beam-shaping so amazing it’s hard to tell from the ground looking up what’s ceiling and what’s fixture. It reminded me of a conversation I had some years ago with one of my esteemed industry colleagues, a top global lighting designer. He told me his ideal light fitting would be invisible. I pointed to nothing in the corner and said something like, there’s a pallet of invisible fittings, they’re yours for £20k.
Sometimes we forget it’s L+B with the B being building. To be honest I got pretty overwhelmed when I walked round all of the building controls companies’ booths like KNX and ABB. I suppose I’m a lighting guy at heart and I felt more comfortable in Hall 8, where most of the lighting controls companies were. I remember talking about the ‘promise of LED’ in the early noughties. The industry has realised finally, I believe, that the ‘promise of LED’ can only be delivered using appropriate control. That means using digital data. Data can be extracted from the driver, in a standard manner thanks to DALI. Data can be sent over multiple transport protocols, wired and wireless. Data can be used to deliver useful lighting outcomes, as I saw on Zumtobel Group’s Tridonic booth. It can be used to deliver, most importantly, quality of light. We like to forget about quality of light from time to time don’t we, when lm/w or £/lm is more important. Ten years ago I was wondering if this data would ever make it to ‘mass market’. Well it has so let’s use it. And so has wireless. Which brings me to the following.
Is it Battle of the Titans or David and Goliath? Is it a coalition government? I love a mixed metaphor. Hall 8 saw DALI Alliance a few booths down from Casambi, DALI being an open global standard and Casambi being a proprietary control protocol. Never the ‘twain shall meet, I hear you chuckle. No? Well, Casambi which is undoubtedly one of the most popular, but not the only, wireless ecosystems around, seems to have entered the wired world. Their new product can connect a Casambi ecosystem to a wired DALI system and control everything through the Casambi app, it seems. DALI Alliance has launched DALI+, just before the show in fact and was proudly showing the first compliant products. I think the phrase is watch this space, I shall watch with interest.
Before I admit to what I got completely wrong in my 2014 review, let me mention the final important trend that I witnessed.
Human Centric Lighting (HCL), sometimes labelled ‘circadian lighting’, is mentioned in the same sentence perhaps with phrases like ‘melanopic lux’ and ‘non-visual effects of light’. I have never seen so many lighting companies claiming that they have some form of HCL; what a revelation. Do they have HCL? If so, what is it? The ones I asked, about 50/50 split in my opinion either had not much of a clue or had a clue but didn’t think they could really sell it. It’s niche, it’s less than 1% of real projects they said. It’ll be VE’d out they said. Strange because it was high on the marketing agenda. There must be something in it? I saw full spectrum chip solutions with SPD graphs everywhere. Infrared wavelengths are even on the lighting agenda these days. We could be on the brink of a new frontier of lighting for health. Or we could be wandering up the greenwashing path – except it could be labelled ‘wellwashing’. Call me a cynic, go on.
I thought it would take 10 years but it’s taken 20. The global players like Philips, Osram and GE seem to be firmly in the past. The Forum had a new tenant. I didn’t see many UK visitors and that was before the well-timed airline strike disruption, I got out with a day to spare. In my 2014 review I mentioned I’d sensibly booked an airline that wasn’t on strike so some things remain the same! The show is hard to navigate physically, I’m able-bodied and I was shattered after a couple of days. There’s limited signage, even I got lost and I’ve been going since 2006. Metres and metres of carpets being ripped up again. We have been so happy as an industry to start up the trade shows again but I wonder if this is a dead-cat bounce, (look that up if you don’t know).
So what did I get wrong? In 2014 I wrote ‘OLED… it’s on the right path’.
Can’t wait for L+B 2026…
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