What is the future of office lighting?

The Covid-19 lockdown has created a storm of comment about what the future of office work will look like. Will we all eventually wander back to our desks as if nothing happened, or are we all turning into long-term home-workers?

Whatever the outcome, there will be changes; and there will be issues that we, as lighting manufacturers, specifiers and influencers, need to come to terms with. Here, we discuss what the future of office lighting may look like.

LIA: We’ve seen the recent Statement put out by the LIA (Lighting – a key contributor to healthy buildings with better Indoor Environmental Quality). That statement calls for a full renovation of luminaires, rather than re-lamping exercises.

New lighting should incorporate controls and sensors and should be designed to ensure health and well-being, productivity and occupant safety and welfare. The implications of incorporating controls and sensors leads us to assume that we’ll only be providing working illumination when and where it’s needed.

SLL: is putting together an initiative to encourage building developers to move away from catA fit-out – the most wasteful specification, both of money and material resources, imaginable. This comes from Bob Bohannon’s inaugural speech to the SLL in June 2020, where he promoted the concept of Build Back Better.

This initiative will be aimed at removing the ubiquitous 600×600 LED panel installation that is installed and often ripped out before the office space is occupied.

Other aspects discussed were:

• What might a new approach look like in practice

• The ‘new normal’ and the ‘old normal’

• Health and safety practices within the open-plan space

• Workstations becoming ‘floating work islands’

• The home workstation

• Other aspects of office lighting that may/will be considered beneficial to the future office

• Lighting for health and wellbeing

• Lighting for antimicrobial disinfection.

• Lighting for ‘pod working’

See the full article here - The Future Office