david k warfel
Would you rather invest in expensive electrical equipment or your quality of life? Recently one of our custom integration partners asked me why homeowners should choose digitally controlled lighting over panelized dimming systems. As a lighting professional, the choice is so clear to me that it can be difficult to imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to go... Continue Reading →
Giving the Simple Gift of Light #8 “THE CLAW CHOOSES WHO WILL GO AND WHO WILL STAY” – Alien #17, Toy Story Sometimes choosing light fixtures can seem like an arcade game, and that is not a good thing. You take a good look at the products but cannot quiet the nagging suspicion that there... Continue Reading →
The Simple Gift of Light #7 The key benefits of light- gentle mornings, energetic days, relaxing evenings, and restful nights- come only when we consume the right light at the right time. But what makes some lighting good and other lighting bad? There are seemingly endless technical considerations that quickly get overwhelming and, honestly, few... Continue Reading →
Giving the Simple Gift of Light #8 Lighting design is at once quite simple and quite challenging, and the concept of viewing angle is a perfect example of this paradox. Simply put, light travels in a straight line and so does our vision, which makes predicting glare and comfort easy. Easy, that is, so long... Continue Reading →
One of the perennially difficult aspects of the role of lighting designer is the struggle over budget allocation. Lighting is most often viewed as a utility or commodity, something to be installed as cheaply as possible, but that too often robs the homeowners of comfort, relaxation, energy, and more. So how do we help homeowners... Continue Reading →
The Simple Gift of Light #4 You can skip reading this post if the stress of the workday falls off your shoulders and you find relaxation easily when you return home. This post is for the rest of us. Perhaps you work at home or away and juggle responsibilities or push your body physically all... Continue Reading →
A special thanks to Tony Esposito for inspiring this post with his excellent presentation at the IES Maritime conference on Prince Edward Island recently. Everyone loves talking about lighting acronyms, right? Ah, what a joy to discuss CRI, the Color Rendering Index, the gold standard of lighting quality for decades. Five of them, in fact,... Continue Reading →
Not all that is new in lighting is much better. One of the newest trends in architectural and residential lighting is tubes of light about 1” in diameter. When I started my career a rather good number of years ago, we called these T8 Fluorescent Tubes, and they were universally loathed for their institutional feel.... Continue Reading →
The Washington Post called following an online rant by pop singer Mariah Carey against "overhead lighting." The author wanted to hear from lighting experts and might have suspected that I would follow the usual lighting professional response tactics and point out the complexities and intricacies of overhead lighting are far more nuanced than a celebrity... Continue Reading →
It is time to retire your light switches and dimmers…if you want to get the full benefits of good light back into your life. Get them back? Yes, you and I lost out on natural light’s benefits when our ancestors decided houses were better than tents and offices were better than fields. They moved indoors,... Continue Reading →
the language of light 