In praise of persistence

Abstract

This issue of Lighting Research and Technology is devoted to the theme of ambient lighting, a topic driven largely by the work of Kit Cuttle. In my opinion, Kit Cuttle has been one of the foremost thinkers and educators in lighting for more than 50 years. I first met Kit in 1967, at the time he was working on the flow of light from windows, a topic that led to the concept of vector/ scalar ratio as a metric for modelling, one of the first attempts to quantify lighting characteristics beyond planar illuminance. In 1976, he emigrated to New Zealand, where he joined the Wellington Victoria University School of Architecture and thus began his career in lighting education, a career that has included teaching at the Lighting Research Center and at the University of Auckland and from which many students have benefited. Teaching has been one of Kit’s strengths. This is because he sees it as a two-way process. The students learn from him and he learns from the students. One thing that became apparent to him when teaching the design process was that students tended to adopt a technology-first approach. To Kit, this was wrong. He has always advocated that the first question to be addressed in any lighting design is what do you want to see? As a result, he has developed a series of simple devices for demonstrating the way in which the reflection characteristics of 3D objects and the luminous flux distribution around them interact to create a shadow pattern, a highlight pattern and a shading pattern. These are well explained in his book Lighting by Design. But this was not enough for him. The bigger question is: How can such knowledge be incorporated into a design method? The problem Kit identified is that conventional lighting design is dominated by the lumen method, a method that encourages a technology-first approach and that inevitably leads to a regular array of luminaires providing uniform illumination. Over the last decade, he has sought to change the primary function of interior lighting from lighting the task to lighting the space, from task lighting to ambient lighting. To achieve this calls for a new design method based on first stating what the lighting objectives are and then determining the luminous flux distribution needed to achieve those objectives. It is only at this point that the technology to be used is selected. The potential impact of this Lighting Objectives Design Procedure on lighting practice is huge. How has he achieved so much? I believe the answer is primarily through persistence, but also through openness and ingenuity. Throughout his career, he has persisted in thinking about how to make lighting better. Furthermore, he is open with his time and thoughts. He has a gift for listening, for observation and for asking significant questions. Finally, he is an ingenious fellow who can create thought experiments, develop devices and create systematic design procedures. The world of lighting has been lucky to have him.