Articles
How Many Studies Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb – Part 4 – Bright Lights Don’t Have to be Bright
By Noah Sabatier
If every installation of an outdoor LED fixture was compared to scoring in sports, the crowd would rise with a resounding cry of “my eyes!”. Of course, LEDs aren’t alone in this issue, nor does any source of light need to produce blinding glare. There is much talk from voices within the lighting industry concerning the goal of minimizing glare. The past decades however have seen a redirection in fixture design with the result of increased glare. A disturbing amount of marketing for lighting, and even some professional research, has appropriated brightness to represent good lighting. This one-dimensional sentiment has been used to market a great deal of visually harsher lighting, under the belief that brighter means better. Unbeknownst to many, glare has come along for the ride.
How Many Studies Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb – Part 3 – Some Roads are Shinier than Others
By Noah Sabatier
If you have made it to part 3 of this article series, congratulations! You have now considered more evidence on real-world visual performance than those who decided to install white LED streetlights in your community. Today we will examine two more factors in lighting selection. Weather and the spectral reflectance of surfaces pose often-overlooked challenges to identifying ideal lighting designs.
How Many Studies Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?
Part 1
By Noah Sabatier
Changing a light bulb in our home is perhaps the most simple task in which we can still credit ourselves for performing household maintenance. The amount of thought such an operation receives rarely extends beyond looking for the most efficient pack of bulbs on a store shelf. What happens however, when a municipal utility department has over 100,000 streetlights to change?
How Many Studies Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb? – Part 2 – We (hopefully) Look Where We’re Going
By Noah Sabatier
In the previous article we discussed how the retina adapts to different levels of light, and what this means for optimizing outdoor dusk-to-dawn lighting. We will now move on to the mechanisms that our visual system uses to aim our eyes. Compared to the rudimentary considerations that luminance adaptation got in professional lighting guidance, there was virtually no examination of eye movements or gaze control. The first major study that tested whether or not roadway lighting guidance was accurate without the aforementioned considerations was conducted in 2015. This is several years after organizations such as the IESNA began to recommend white lighting for general dusk-to-dawn illumination. To put it mildly, the cart was several miles ahead of the horse.
Lighting for the Aging Eye
By Noah Sabatier
In 2022 nearly 1/3rd of the US population was over the age of 55. Many of us personally know someone who has struggled with vision as they age, these challenges becoming most present during driving. This issue is reflected in research, with older drivers displaying slower reaction times and higher collision rates compared to younger drivers. Driving performance differences become amplified at night, a time in which the aging eye has its greatest impact on visibility.
The Streetlight Effect: Modern Considerations of Early Observations in the Psychology of Outdoor Lighting
By Noah Sabatier
It’s no secret that people don’t enjoy searching for something in the dark. Shadows dance, shapes shift and forms seemingly appear out of nowhere. The Streetlight Effect originated as an early 1900s anecdote in which a drunken man is searching for his keys. A police officer helps him search, resulting in both men spending several minutes under a streetlight. When the officer asks if the drunken man lost his keys under the streetlight he replies “no, this is where the light is”.