WARNING: this is not a good review.
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I’ve been attending FutureBuild (EcoBuild as was) on and off for the past decade and more. I’m not sure that I approve of the name change, not that anyone’s listening to me. But ECOBuild was a statement of intent; we all knew what it meant. ECO was – and still is – a thing.
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FutureBuild is one of those portmanteau words that sort of states the bleedin’ obvious. Unless you’re running a show for conservators, it’s hard to imagine a PastBuild, so the ‘Future’ bit is redundant, but that just leaves you with ‘Build’; which is probably accurate but doesn’t win hearts and souls at a time when we need an active and robust to an existential climate crisis..
ECOBuild sounds a decent option. Why not try that?
Whatever – the simple takeaway from this year’s show is that the lighting industry has clearly solved all problems, present and future, something that can easily be gleaned from the non-appearance of any lighting manufacturers (pace the few who did turn up)
Energy efficiency and carbon reduction
The lighting industry has nothing to say about the upcoming changes to Energy Performance Standards; the likely appearance of a MEPS (minimum energy performance standard) rating that very few – if anyone – in the industry actually agrees with. And – more to the point – no one turned up to put any alternative case for some version of LENI to be introduced in place of a single, brutish, metric that will go nowhere to produce real energy reductions in lighting use.
Circular Economy and remanufacturing
I could have sworn that this was been the burning topic of 2022 and will continue to shout loudly for years to come. But then again, maybe I missed the memo that said it was all sorted and no one needed to get out of bed to press for a different way to specify and re-use luminaires.
Dark Skies and Biodiversity.
There is an awful lot of construction going on in the rural environment and along suburban hinterlands, with lots of implications for a nett increase in outdoor illumination. But this is something else that we don’t need to talk about. Despite local authority planning departments requiring detailed outdoor lighting proposals before planning permissions are given, FutureBuild offered nothing in the way of advice for the architects and planners involved in this kind of work.
The FutureBuild conference programme provided more headline issues for the lighting industry to rally around, tough I see little point in having someone like Michael Grubb present his usual enthusiasm for the future of lighting design if there’s no one for the audience to then go and talk to and share ideas with.
All in all – a very disappointing show. I don’t know whether to point the finger at the organisers for not appreciating what the lighting industry had to bring to the FutureBuild event, of whether to just shake my head at the failings of my industry to galvanise around the one UK show that is focused on The Future (clue in mane – see above) and where everyone walking the aisles is looking for better and more efficient ways of achieving their design goals.
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