Emre Güneş: Writing

How I run a PIM implementation for a lighting manufacturer

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every implementation I’ve run has gone through the same five steps. The timing changes. The shape doesn’t.

What follows is the version I share with clients at the start of an engagement. What each step is, how long it takes, and where projects tend to stall.

Step 0: Proposal (1–2 months)

Before I write a proposal, I need to understand the project. Four inputs:

Input data. Where does it live today? Excel files? An ERP nobody trusts? A CRM with sales-side fields that don’t match engineering’s spec sheets?
Output channels. Where does the data need to land? Website is usually first. Then datasheet. Then catalogue, installation manual, brochure.
Resources. Who’s the decision maker? Who’s the data entry team? Who holds the technical info engineering won’t write down?
Variables. How many SKUs? How many languages? Is there a US-vs-international version of the same product? (For lighting, the answer is almost always yes.)

Then the proposal. The budget has three lines:

Vendor fee. The annual PIM subscription, paid to the vendor.
Coding fee. Paid to the development team that builds the integrations and the outputs (website, datasheet, anything else in Phase 1). If you have an internal coding team or a vendor you already trust, this goes to zero. They can still do the work. But a coding team without PIM experience can slow the project down. What matters is a PIM mindset. The shape of the work changes as the project moves. So it’s a dynamic process, not a standard website build where you set the scope and finish with one or two revisions.
Consultancy fee. Mine. I run the project end to end, train the internal team alongside the work, and I’m responsible for the outcome. If someone on your side with a technical background can take the project manager role, my fee can go down, or even to zero. That hasn’t happened yet. If it does, I’d support that person without crowding them out.

I separate these on purpose. The client should see what’s paid to the vendor, what’s paid to the developers, and what’s paid to me. Bundling them hides where the work sits.

This step takes 1–2 months. The variance is on the client’s side, not mine. Clear inputs, fast proposal. Vague inputs, I keep asking.

Step 1: Discovery (1–2 months)

Once the proposal is signed, I work closely with the internal team to define the project in detail.

This is the base of the building. If the base is weak, everything after compounds in the wrong direction.

My rule for Phase 1: stay close to the bare minimum. Website plus datasheet is usually right. After that, the project grows: installation manuals, brochures, distributor portals. But Phase 1 needs to be small enough to ship.

The temptation here is always to widen the scope. “While we’re at it, can we also do…” No. Phase 1 ships, then we add. A widened Phase 1 is a Phase 1 that never launches.

This step also takes 1–2 months. Same dependency on client clarity.

Step 2: Data structure and briefs (1–2 months)

This is where I turn Step 1’s inputs into a data structure and the briefs that go to the coding team.

For a normal project, no more than a month. For a complex one, usually when the client’s product ordering system itself needs a rewrite, up to two.

Most lighting catalogues have an ordering logic that was designed decades ago and has inherited every product since. At some point the logic stops carrying the product range. That has to be fixed first. PIM can’t paper over a broken ordering structure.

Step 3: Coding and data entry (3–4 months)

Once Step 2 is locked, the briefs go to the coding team.

At this stage we only enter sample data. The coding team needs the structure, not the full catalogue. Logic first, content second.

While the coding team works, the internal team starts entering the full catalogue. This is the hardest part of the project. Not technically. Mentally. The team is used to spreadsheets, and PIM asks them to think in fields, inheritance, and products as records. I stay close during this stretch because the mindset shift is where projects quietly stall.

This step is 3–4 months. Sometimes longer if the catalogue is older or messier than anyone realised in Step 1.

Step 4: Launch

After Step 3, we’re ready to launch and close Phase 1. The first outputs go live. Usually the website and the datasheet.

It’s a proud moment. A lot of work goes into it. And this is when the client first sees the ROI. Not as a number on a slide. As a website that updates when they change one field.

Then something interesting happens. With Phase 1 done and the foundation strong, the client starts looking at the next manual process to fix. Then the next.

That’s where the culture starts to change.

If you’re a lighting manufacturer thinking about PIM, contact me for a 30-minute call. Or start here:

Simplifying Complexity: The Benefits of PIM for Lighting Manufacturers

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Edit on 26.12.2024:

You can watch the webinar from the link:

saleslayer.com

Join 30-minutes webinar and see how you can turn chaos to order

December 3rd, 2024

15:00 (GMT +1) / 09:00 AM (UTC-4)

Complex vs Simple

Join Ağustos and Sales Layer for an insightful 30-minutes webinar designed to transform product information management for lighting manufacturers. Here’s what you can expect:

Top 3 reasons to adopt a PIM system:

Discover the three most critical reasons why lighting manufacturers need a Product Information Management (PIM) system, focusing on essential areas like technical documentation, multi-version and multi-language support, and adapting to changing components and requirements. We’ll detail how a PIM system addresses these specific challenges.

What changes after a PIM project?

See the impact of a well-implemented PIM system through real-life examples, showcasing how a unified data source and single source of truth can revolutionize your business processes and company culture.

Our approach to PIM projects:

Uncover how Ağustos manages PIM projects with clarity and guidance to minimize uncertainties. We’ll walk you through our proven process, so you’ll know exactly what to expect at every stage.

Don’t miss this opportunity to see how PIM can transform your approach to product information management!

Emre Güneş

Co-founder - PIM Consultant

Mark Symons

International Enterprise Account Executive

3 reasons why you - definitely - need a PIM (Product Information Management) system if you are a lighting manufacturer?

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I have been working in the lighting industry for more than 18 years (and counting). I have taken different roles such as magazine publisher, event organiser, distributor / representative and finally a consultant.

Main problem that I have seen so far with the lighting industry is the lack of updated-technical-information. For a manufacturer, updating the catalogue is often a major event for the marketing teams (mainly for the whole company as it involves many departments). Or, keeping the web site up-to-date is accepted as a time consuming and very expensive activity as well. Especially, if you have many products and want to go with multi-language.

Some of those arguments are true for similar industries, where technical documentation is critical, like Building Materials or Chemical but in this article, I will focus on the lighting manufacturers (where my expertise is) and I will lay out 3 main reasons why, as a lighting manufacturer, you need a PIM (Product Information Management) system in order to stay competitive in today’s fast-changing environment.

1- Technical documentation

If you check PIM (Product Information Management) market today, you often see a big push over multi-channel marketing and e-commerce capabilities. (Mainly B2C approaches.)

But as a consultant, my experience with PIM so far has been on the B2B part and PIM was often the main problem solving mechanism for the technical documentation.

Too many files

Customers expect detailed and accurate product information. Each Product in the lighting industry (or even each Variant) requires many different files to be generated or shared.

Let’s see an important player’s product page:

erco.com

13 different files to download! These needs to be generated as well, manually or automatically. PIM can also help to do that. Of course, not out of the box, but combining with proper coding, it’s very easy to automate some of the file generations.

Too many details

Same goes with product details, let’s check same player’s page:

26 data points to handle!

With thousands of products, it becomes - very quickly - an impossible job to handle.

Excel files, shared folders can only take you to a certain level with basic details, beyond that, a PIM system is an essential tool.

2- Multi-version & Multi-language

Multi-version

To make things more difficult, you need to take into account that each product will have small differences depending on the market, like for US, Input Voltage will be 120-277V whereas for the rest of the world, you will end up with 220-240V version.

Some components like Driver, Power Supply or Accessories will be different as well which will effect the marketing details of that specific product for this specific market.

Multi-language

We live in a super-connected world where global markets are easy to reach if you have the capacity and the talent. So technical documentation, depending on your target markets, will need to be multi-language as well.

Imagine all of those documents, versions and data points to be prepared / generated in not only one but two or (like one of my clients) 13 languages?

What a nightmare!

I would argue that especially for data points, if you work carefully on the data structure planning, you can work it out to have less translations for technical things. But again, this doesn’t change the fact that you still need a PIM system but having a good & experienced consultant (like me) might help more to deal with the problem in an efficient way.

FREE HINT: Keep things to be translated on the higher level of the data hierarchy (Like Family and Product) and the technical data points with universal outputs (no translation needed) can stay on low levels. (like Variant).

3- Changing components and requirements

Changing components

In a standard lighting product (luminaire or fixture as you might call), there are several critical components which defines the performance like LED Chip, Reflector / Lens, Driver, Connector, Cable etc.

And those components, especially after the invention of LED, became a regularly changing items. 2 examples might be: LED chips getting efficiency upgrade every 6 months or drivers being discontinued regularly.

So changing those will change the technical documentation for all the related products on every version and every language!

Changing requirements

This doesn’t stop only with components. There are new data requirements coming up regularly as well. Less than the component maybe, but still, you might need to add a new data point to any of the level in any time.

Like a WELL standard which will require to declare the Flicker of your products: wellcertified.com

Or recently, Environmental Product Declaration is becoming a must have document and without a PIM and a very detailed component hierarchy, it’s impossible to prepare.

Conclusion

Being a lighting manufacturer is not easy these days. Especially, with the invention of LED, there are new players joining regularly, like the California gold rush (1848–1855). Profit margins are getting lower constantly. Any new high-technology product are becoming a commodity very quickly.

In order to fight this, your time to market is more critical than ever. As I tried to explain in this article, without a PIM system, it’s nearly impossible to manage it properly.

If you are still dealing with Excel’s and shared folders, please reach out to us so that we show you how life could have been. Believe me, once you see this side of the world, there is no going back.

Emre Güneş

Who am I? Please see: agustos.com
What I do as a PIM consultant? Please see: agustos.com

“A man everyone loved”: farewell to Enis Güneş

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

On Saturday, 28 January 2023, at 15:40, I lost my beloved father. He was 82 when he left us, and his health had been getting worse for almost two and a half years. He caught COVID twice, in October 2020 and July 2022, and each time he spent 10 days in hospital. Then fluid built up in his lungs, and just before New Year he spent another 10 days in hospital. Every stay left him less able to move and pushed his dementia further along. It had been 15 days since the cancer diagnosis, and one week since the PET scan we had ordered showed it had spread through his whole body. For those 15 days, the three of us (my two older sisters and I) had been working out how to care for him well at home, and how he could spend his last days in peace. Whether or not to treat it was one question. But mostly we argued about things like which painkiller to give him, and how often. Bless him, my father had the final say, as he always did. He left us quietly, without a fuss. And of course, in a way that was so like him, he left the rest of us a magical story.

For a long time I had taken my son Can to my parents’ place at every chance I got. I wanted him to keep his grandfather company in his last days, and to lift the gloom that was bound to hang over the house. On Friday I told my wife I didn’t want to take Can the next day. There was no reason. I just didn’t want to. As it happened, my aunt had called on Friday evening. My mother’s brother in İzmit, the only one of her four brothers still alive, had had a brain haemorrhage and fallen down the stairs. Or he had fallen down the stairs and had a brain haemorrhage. They didn’t know which came first. They didn’t want to tell my mother, but they were letting me know. On the phone I said, “I’ll go tomorrow and tell her, and I’ll bring my mother to İzmit.” On Saturday morning, as I always did, I walked in, hugged my mother tight and kissed her, then went to the room where my father had spent the last two and a half years. When he saw me, he tilted over to the right. Because of his pain, he always lay on his left side. I went up to him and, almost as a routine, stroked his head and kissed his forehead. A bit more, he said. So I kept stroking his hair, and my mother and my sister Nur came into the room. I made my usual joke: “I’m your favourite child, aren’t I, baba? Say it so everyone hears it again.” (Baba is what we call our dads in Turkish.) My father pointed at Nur and said, “my firstborn darling”. The feelings in the air were so thick you could almost touch them. Love, tenderness, longing (for the past, for the healthy days).

We moved to the kitchen, and over breakfast and a chat I told my mother what had happened. “You’ll want to see my uncle, let’s go to İzmit,” I said. She didn’t want to at all. Your father shouldn’t be left alone with the caregiver, she said. I pushed: “You never know, mum. See my uncle one last time, while he’s still in this world,” I insisted. She agreed, very reluctantly. While we were getting ready to leave for İzmit, the phone rang. The intensive care units in İzmit and the provinces around it were full, so they were bringing my uncle to the 100. Yıl Hospital in Pendik. That gave us a bit more time, so I thought I’d sit with my father for a while. I sat on the chair at the foot of his bed. He hadn’t started a conversation in a long time, but suddenly he lifted his head and said, “It’s been long enough now. I should go.” And I said, “Of course, go, my dear baba. You’ve done what you came to do in this life. You raised 3 children and saw 4 grandchildren. You lived a good life. Don’t suffer any more.” “And if there is anything between us, I forgive you all of it,” I added. He forgave me too. “But,” I said, “if you see Grandma, your mum, and if the two of you can send a sign to this side, send us one.” “No, I can’t do that,” he said. “Well, at least give her my love,” I said. He moved his head as if to say okay.

We left to see my uncle. Five or ten minutes after we got to the hospital, the caregiver called: “Baba has thrown up. His lips are purple and he isn’t moving.” We called 112 (the Turkish emergency number) and set off for home at once. All the way, I kept leaning on the horn and praying at the same time. I prayed that if the ambulance got there before us, they wouldn’t push my father too hard, wouldn’t take away his peace. When we got there, we learned that my father had already passed away by the time the ambulance arrived. The caregiver told us about his last moments like this: “Baba suddenly threw up. Then he lifted his head and called out, ‘Mum, Mum’. Then he threw up again, reached his hand toward the window behind him and called out again, ‘my dear mum, my dear mum’. It was as if his mother came, took Baba and left”.

We had arrived 10 minutes after the ambulance. When we saw him again, he was still warm. Bless him, he didn’t want his family to go through those last moments and that pain. His face had a peace it hadn’t had for a long time. I could almost say he looked healthy again. My dear baba.

My father was a beautiful person. As my cousin Oğuz (the son of my father’s older sister) put it in his message, he was “a man everyone loved”. We didn’t have a father and son relationship in the classic sense. Almost the only outing together I can remember is a trip to the cinema when I was 14. Apart from that, I have no memory of my father outside the house. He retired young, and for more than 40 years his life ran between the house and the neighbourhood coffeehouse, which he went to with the discipline of a job. After a while even the coffeehouse became too much, and he played bridge on the computer. In those years, an internet outage or a mouse that stopped working turned into a code-red phone call for me. These were problems that came into my life and that I had to fix as fast as I could. As I remember him, he was always at home. With his great presence, his good company and the great one-liners he came out with now and then, he was like a safe harbour. You knew he was there, and that was enough.

He had read all the holy books, but he was not a believer. My mother is religious, and the subject came up at almost every chance, yet he never pushed any of us to pick a side. On the contrary, when my mother insisted hard on the Eid prayer, he would say, “Don’t upset your mother, son.” He had a wisdom whose source I still don’t fully understand. He had only finished high school, yet he had read all the Russian and French classics. He also had a big library, which came to an end when I, a little rascal, started tearing it up. My grandfather beat my father a lot when he was a child. He wasn’t even allowed into a room while his father was in it. My father would tell us these stories and always say, “I will never put my children through this.” I got a slap from my father only once. It was when we lived in Bağlarbaşı. A car hit me while I was crossing a dangerous street. My leg was black and blue and I was limping badly, but in my little mind I thought I could hide it. When he found out, he was angry that I had lied, and he slapped me. You always felt at ease with him. When something fell and broke, he would say straight away, “Never mind, as long as you’re okay.” “The person who dropped it (or made the mistake) is sad enough already. I can’t be sadder than them,” he would say. About his career as a civil servant, which began and ended at the PTT (the Turkish post office), he would say: “In all my years as a civil servant I never took a bribe. But nobody ever offered me one. I was never put to the test, so I can’t call myself innocent either.” When he told us he had never cheated on my mother in their 57 years of marriage, he would say: “I lived fast until your mother. Once, after a single phone call, I even went to Adana for a woman I had never met. But I am the first man your mother ever knew. I couldn’t do her wrong.” On the morning I left for France to do my master’s, he walked me to the door and said just one thing: “Don’t you dare be a racist over there.”

My father was 39 when I was born. I was 39 when Can was born. In these last years, there were many days when I changed Can’s nappy in the morning and my father’s in the evening. We spent time together in a different way. They say you grow up when your father dies or when you have a child. Both happened to me. I don’t feel grown up. But, as all my life, I feel “lucky” again. Lucky to have had a father like him, and lucky that he left us a story like this on his last day. Safe journey, my beloved baba. One day, somehow, we’ll see each other again. Take care of yourself.

Emre Güneş

NOTE 1: A thousand thanks, once again, to everyone who called, sent a message or flowers, came to the mosque, the grave and (or) the house. To everyone who, one way or another, made us feel they were with us. I felt every touch on my shoulder and in my heart. I’m so glad you’re in my life.

NOTE 2: I remember every period of my life by a song. A song that gets stuck in my head and that I play all the time. I listen to it for hours on repeat and never tire of it. For my father’s last days, this was my song. I hope you enjoy it too.

Raf - Akustik Versiyon

Sunday, 26 September 2021. A family breakfast get-together.

Who will change the baby’s nappy?

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

It has been a long time since I last sat down at the computer to write. Since we said goodbye to the print edition of PLD Türkiye in March 2018, I seem to have written only 4 articles. Sometimes I can't find my way out of one for days, and I wrestle with words to say what I mean. But already, from these first sentences, I can see that I have missed writing, just as I have missed the magazine. Let me add "write more" to my 2020 wish list right now.

The title may have surprised you. What lighting design could have to do with nappies does not spring to mind at first. You're right, but the link is stronger than you think. Please let me explain.

Even though it has become less common in recent years, I spent most of my professional life explaining why the lighting designer profession should exist and why lighting design matters. The sentences and analogies I used again and again, sometimes in writing, sometimes out loud, changed and evolved over time. Then I noticed that I had never written down one analogy that I have been repeating all the time for the last 3 years, and which I did not invent. It belongs to my friend, the important Swedish lighting designer Kai Piippo, whom I also had the chance to host as a speaker in Türkiye. I came across Kai's approach in the film “Perfect Light”, which we also screened in Türkiye, and it has stayed with me since the first time I heard it. This article is about that.

Light is a miraculous thing. We may forget it in the daily rush, but light is the one thing we cannot do without to connect with the outside world. 80% of the information and messages that reach our brain arrive through our eyes, that is, thanks to light. If I asked you to close your eyes and picture a forest, the first image to come to mind would be beams of light filtering through the trees. Physically, light behaves as both a particle and a wave. As if that were not enough, it also plays the lead role in miraculous natural events like the northern lights or a rainbow after rain.

That is why we all love light. The building industry is no exception. Client, architect, electrical engineer and so on: everyone involved loves light, and lighting. Just like a baby. With a few exceptions, almost all of us light up when we see a little baby, and want to kiss and cuddle it. But the moment the baby fills its nappy, that is when the family steps in and changes it. In other words, someone is responsible for the baby.

So who will take responsibility for light in the building process? If things go wrong and there is a problem with the lighting, who will be responsible? This is where Kai Piippo says: in the building process, responsibility for light & lighting, everyone's precious baby, lies with the lighting designer. The lighting designer is the only person who defines all the baby's needs and can step in the moment a problem comes up. So, if needed, the lighting designer changes the baby's nappy too.

I have to admit that an important event in my personal life also played a part in this article. On 20 October 2019 my son (Can Güneş) was born. Maybe not in the building industry, but at home, I have been the one changing the baby's nappies ever since.

Emre Güneş

The man himself: tiny feet, big Can.

LEDs and colour: Is every building a disco now?

Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMT

LEDs have been in commercial use since as far back as the 1960s. The blue LED came in the early 1990s. But LEDs really entered our lives through general lighting in 2008 and the years after. Small size, long life and easy colour change let them quickly catch up with every other light source, and today they are close to a monopoly. OLED, which has not settled yet, and laser, which is still developing, stand as threats. Even so, we have to accept that all conventional light sources are behind us now. Today, when people hear the word lighting, they think of LED.

I wrote about the effects of the lawlessness and the lack of standards that this fast change brought in this article. (See: The wild west, or the lighting industry after LED). Today I want to take a close look at the relationship between LEDs and the use of colour.

Hardly a day goes by without another historic façade on the city skyline renewing its lighting and putting on a show of colour. This transformation, "out of context and baseless" to put it most politely, and in truth carried out quite mindlessly, comes in every size, from a single façade to a whole district. On this subject, the Kuzey Yıldızı park in Ankara's Pursaklar district has already earned its place in history as an unbelievable example. Grandpas with BIM supermarket bags cracking sunflower seeds under pink-lit pergolas, or the torment people go through every night with red light shining into their homes: believe me, I can't quite decide which is stranger. I also take it as one of life's little ironies that these are called "decorative" work, and that Ankara was once even the subject of a lighting award for them. The article I wrote on this, which even ended all our business with an international lighting manufacturer, is still relevant. (See: An Ankara tale…)

Photo @ www.adabasini.com

Lighting design draws on many disciplines. Under normal conditions, the design process should grow out of the input of different disciplines such as physics, electricity, psychology, health and sociology. In this sense, any approach that ignores the relationship between colour and culture feeds the "mindless" transformation I mentioned.

Colour and culture

A colour does not mean the same thing in every culture. How it is used, and what it calls to mind, differ from one culture to another. To take the simplest case, green does not mean the same thing in a region with Muslim roots as it does in America. Or look at the clear effect of the seasons on the choice of colour temperature. Northern Europe mostly likes warm white (2700K, 3000K), while the Middle East may prefer cool white (4000K, 5000K). Some cultures, like Iran, even use 3000K and 4000K side by side in the same luminaire. These preferences form over time. When we come back to the case of Türkiye, too much colour, that is, many colours used together and in motion, has a clear cultural meaning: "pavyon" (the seedy Turkish nightclub). As it came up during the lighting of İstanbul's Bosphorus Bridge, most of us think of this word the moment we see lots of colour. In the Far East, on the other hand, colours are woven into the culture and accepted.

Context

And even if you accept the risk of the "pavyon" label and decide to use colour, you must answer one very important question. Why? Why do you use those colours, with that animation? This question is not special to lighting. Whatever the discipline (architecture, graphics and so on), every design decision you make should have an answer to "why". But the risk here makes it even more important. Sadly, most of the time the answer is: because "the LED can change colour". So if it can change, why shouldn't it? Right? How very logical!

I know the client makes these decisions most of the time, so when I bring this up, my salesperson and designer friends can say "but the client wants it". They're right. In fact, one story I tell in my talks still makes me laugh. A friend from the technical team of another major, internationally known manufacturer told it to me. They go to a façade project in Azerbaijan. The aim is to present two scenarios they prepared in advance to the client and get approval. A large team, the client included, is waiting. Before showing the scenarios, the friend telling the story first runs a test scenario they use to check that all the LEDs work. The client watches this test scenario, in which every possible colour flashes on and off for 5 minutes with no aim and no context, and says "I love it". After that, however hard they try to explain, and even though they show the other scenarios, the client doesn't change their mind. To this day, that test scenario is still putting on its "show" on that façade.

Control mechanism and a suggestion

In fact, the strangeness of the situation is plain to see. In a place that affects the whole city skyline, the entire decision comes down to the client's say-so. It will stay that way wherever there is no public control. Sadly, our country still has no such control mechanism.

Besides, it's only human to like something flashy and whirling that you see for just 5 minutes. The problem is for the city and the neighbours who have to look at that façade all night. As I said in this article, unless we treat light like sound, that is, unless we set rules for the use of light in public space as we do for sound, this will go on just the same. (See: 3 basic proposals to (largely) prevent light pollution.)

I hope this changes too, once the İstanbul City Lighting Master Plan, which we have been hearing about for a long time, is announced and put into effect.

Until these rules settle, I have a humble suggestion for all my salesperson and designer friends who are sincerely bothered by the process. Please warn your clients. If you can, run these approvals by having them look at the same view all night, not just for 5 minutes. A dinner at a restaurant facing the façade, maybe? Slower transitions, different scenarios after midnight: you can suggest all of these.

Now is the time to act. But only by acting together can we start the change. That way, the ever more colourful life of recent years can calm down a little, and the people forced to put up with this light trespass can suffer a little less. Otherwise we'll all end up asking a new question, and asking it a lot: "Or are you still holding out against the disco?"

Emre Güneş

What is light pollution? The work in Türkiye

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

When light pollution comes up, I see many people surprised. The first thing that strikes them is that the idea makes no sense, and they ask straight away: “What does light pollution mean? Can light pollute too?” The answer always makes them more curious. Because light really can pollute. How? Let's look at the details together.

Put simply, light pollution is what happens when light from undesigned/unplanned lighting escapes into the sky, hits dust and similar particles, and forms a curtain between us and the stars.

This curtain gives us the chart below, which I also use in my talks: the relationship between the number of stars in the sky and the number of cows around you. Whenever we move away from the city (from modernity), we get the stars back, as if there were no stars in the sky above our cities…

What really happens is that the curtain light pollution creates cuts our link with the stars. In other words, we can no longer observe them. That's why astronomers and amateur astronomers care about this issue more than anyone.

I know that “light pollution” sounds very romantic when I put it this way. You might say, “So what if we don't see the stars?” But light pollution, which shows itself like this, actually upsets a balance that formed over billions of years. Since the very first day, the Earth has lived under 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of moonlight. This 24-hour cycle defines everything, for us and for every living thing in nature: body structure, feeding, migration routes, survival skills. And when this structure breaks, anomalies begin.

Electric lighting entered our lives about 130 years ago. Artificial lighting, which I'd call the most important invention of modernity, changed our lifestyle and our social and cultural structure. Modernity and artificial light walked arm in arm: where there was light, it counted as modern, and a lack of light counted as backwardness. As the night became part of social life too, we moved, at a pace that never stops, toward a 24/7 way of life. And we lost control. Things have now gone so far that they threaten the balance of nature, built over billions of years.

So what harm can a broken cycle do? Let me explain with a few examples.

Harm to the environment: First of all, we're talking about wasted energy. At a time when energy matters this much, and when energy efficiency and sustainability are this prominent, all this wasted energy harms the environment indirectly. Because we also spend energy on these unnecessary lights. In the US, the energy wasted through light pollution is estimated at 2.2 billion dollars a year. (NOTE: It bothers me enormously that marketing uses energy efficiency and sustainability so much that it has, in a sense, emptied them of meaning. But that's a topic for another post.)
Harm to animals: Birds that normally migrate by following the stars lose their way because of city lights, fly into skyscrapers and die. Again, we're talking about thousands of birds dying every year. Or take another example: sea turtles must reach the sea within 1-2 minutes of hatching. To do that, they follow the stars that guide them. But city lights near these beaches confuse them, and they become targets for predators.
Harm to plants: The broken cycle also upsets the natural conditions of plants. As you can see in the example, different parts of a tree behave differently because of different light conditions. The part under the street light stays green as if it were still spring.
Harm to our health: In people, this cycle, formed over billions of years, is explained by something called the “circadian rhythm”. This rhythm runs in cycles of 24.5 hours. At its core, it has us active during the day and, at night, resting (thanks to sleep) so our body can renew itself. When we wake up in the morning, our brain releases the hormone cortisol to get us going. At night, before bed, it releases the hormone melatonin to prepare us for sleep. But the screens we use at home (TV, phone and so on) and the city lights that invade our homes suppress melatonin, and our sleep gets shorter and poorer. That causes health problems. For example, it has been proven that nurses who work night shifts are 50% more likely to get cancer.

For all these reasons, we need to get rid of light pollution, that is, unnecessary lighting (what we could call “spam” lighting, in a sense), and stop upsetting the balance of nature.

The work in Türkiye

I first came across the idea of light pollution in 2011. At the PLDC event in Madrid, I had the chance to watch a 52-minute documentary called “The City Dark”, which explains the concept from every angle, and it moved me deeply. The very next year, we organised screenings in İstanbul, İzmir and Ankara so that more building professionals could see the film.

You can watch this talk I gave at YEM in 2013 about the film and about light pollution in general:

At the end of this period, when I had the chance to dig into the subject a bit more, I met Zeki Aslan Hoca (hoca is how Turks address a respected teacher), who has in fact led the way on this issue for years. Zeki Hoca founded the Tübitak observatory in Antalya and even drafted a bill on the subject back in 1999. In 2013, he and I were both speakers at the “Light Pollution in Türkiye” seminar that we organised. Our joint work has continued ever since.

Bless them: Zeki Hoca and fine people like Bülent Aslan, Dursun Koçer and Memduh Sami Taner work with superhuman effort to take the subject further. With the website they set up, www.isikkirliligi.org, and the TİKE project, they map light pollution in Türkiye and raise awareness, and they really do put in a superhuman effort.

Above all, through the “Astronomi Öğretmenleri Seminerleri” (AÖS, the Astronomy Teachers' Seminars), which they have invited me to regularly since 2014, they raise awareness first among teachers and, through them, among the children who will build the future. It's such a valuable effort that I get goosebumps every time I think of it. Here, an anecdote Bülent Aslan Hoca tells is lovely too. They tell a public official about “light pollution”. He knows nothing about it. That evening at home, he talks with his son, who goes to primary school, and gets a small lesson on light pollution and its harms. After that, his whole approach to the subject changes.

Beyond these seminars, they help these teachers prepare European Union projects, and they also sign joint projects with the municipalities they work with. Mapping light pollution in Eskişehir and in Nilüfer, a district of Bursa, are some of these projects.

Here I want to give them their due once more. However much we thank them all for these efforts, it will never be enough…

What can be done?

Light pollution is actually a problem whose solution has no losers, so every step we take on it will bring good results for all of us. The image below may be the one used most often to show the solution. Even directing light only to where it should go is a big step.

The simplest way to get rid of the problem is “to design the lighting”. So for someone like me, who has been saying “lighting design matters” for years, the solution is a gold mine. As lighting really gets designed and awareness of light pollution grows, we'll see the problem start to disappear.

On this point, I have a few proposals in mind that I've been thinking about for a while and that could solve a large part of the problem. But I'll share them in more detail in my next post.

Emre Güneş
PLD Türkiye

The Wild West, or the lighting industry after LED

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

The Wild West is a term for the sparsely settled "far west" regions of America, especially in the second half of the 19th century. Native American attacks there could not be stopped, and crime rose because the security forces were not enough. In that period no state authority held sway, and anyone could set up law and order “as they pleased” or do business without any standard. Since then, "Wild West" has become a label for any place or period that is out of control and dangerous.

For the lighting industry, which we can now call almost nothing but "the LED industry", "Wild West" is a perfect description. No rules, no order, no standards, no one checking. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

LED clearly deserves "disruptive", the adjective people now use mostly for internet-based technologies. LED technology takes more market share from conventional light sources every day. It developed, and keeps developing, so fast and so out of control that it has already knocked every stone in the lighting industry out of place.

Globally, the market has brought out new component suppliers, especially ones with an innovative approach. At the same time, it has been the stage for lighting manufacturers that appeared with LED and became international brands in a short time. We see some of the big, near-monopoly lighting companies leave the industry one by one in the face of this speed, or at least get ready to leave. Others keep up with the pace of innovation by buying these new companies.

In Türkiye, long-established lighting manufacturers that could not keep up with this change have shut their doors. Investors with no link to the industry (supermarket owners, textile makers and so on) have become lighting manufacturers. Component suppliers have turned into luminaire manufacturers, ad and sign makers into luminaire manufacturers too, and magazine people into component suppliers (don't worry, I'm pointing this one at myself). We have entered a period where everyone is changing identity.

The cards are being dealt again, you may say, and that's normal. But the problem isn't only the number of players springing up like mushrooms, the falling profit margins or the uncertainty. The problem is the dust storm kicked up by the gap between the speed of the switch to LED and the pace at which standards form. The dust is so thick that when you calm down for a moment and think, you can't be sure whether this change brings benefit or harm.

What do I mean by standards forming? Don't tell me an industry this big must have standards. It doesn't. To explain, let's first look at what changed in our lives with LED.

With the old, conventional technologies (halogen, metal halide, sodium vapour, fluorescent, CFL and so on), the world's giant monopolies made lamps to a set standard for each lamp type. A handful of brands, fewer than the fingers of one hand, made these products, and they shared a standard in cap, size, electrical properties and so on. In the old days, when you bought a 50W, 25-degree halogen lamp, you knew what you were getting (even if very small differences were possible). (By the way, let me mention here that these companies came together in the 1920s and formed the world's first monopoly. But I'll save that story for another article.)

Today, you can't say that about LED light sources. If you're far from the subject, I can almost hear you ask “what do you mean?”

WARNING: From here on, I'll talk a lot about technical terms and concepts written with 3 or 4 letters and numbers. My aim is never to confuse you. Quite the opposite: I want to show how complex the subject has become. I also plan to write a separate article on each of these concepts you need to know. Anyway, let's go on.

Here's what I mean: picture 2 track spotlights with LED light sources.

Say both catalogues list 3000K (kelvin, colour temperature), 80 CRI (colour rendering), 10W (watts) and 25 degrees. You'd expect the 2 products to perform about the same, right? Sadly, no.

Example:

https://twitter.com/eugene_andre/status/892127633256873984

As the designer protests above: same colour temperature, same angle, but a very different result.

Now let's look at the specs one by one:

Colour temperature:
3000K really means a value within a certain range around 3000K. So, depending on the manufacturer, the product may sit anywhere between 2600K and 3400K. You can only get an idea of that range from the MacAdam ellipse value (sensitivity to white). (It's also written as SDCM. This concept needs a longer article to explain, and it's not today's subject. For those who want the short version: expect, or ask for, 3 MacAdam ellipses at most. That's a range of about 150K, a difference our eyes can't see in many applications.)

Colour rendering:
80 CRI (colour rendering index), in the simplest terms, is an artificial light source's ability to reproduce colours, scored out of 100. So at its core, this product shows colours 80% correctly. "Correctly" here means how well the product brings out colours compared with a reference light source. (Reference light source: incandescent and halogen lamps for 2700K and 3000K, daylight for 5000K.)

But the CRI calculation, to put it most simply, is meaningless for LED. (Don't get angry, I'll explain it in more detail in another article.) It still meant something for the old standard technologies, but it lost its meaning with LED. For now it's calculated from 8 pastel colours and written as Ra. You can learn about the 7 important colours added later (especially R9, the deep red value, an important wavelength that gives every colour its sparkle) only from certain manufacturers. Then it's written as Re, and it's the average of 15 colours. The TM-30-15 standard, which the IES (Illuminating Engineering Society of North America, sometimes shortened to IESNA) in America brought out last year, hasn't caught on. I'll try to explain that too in the article on CRI. Before TM-30-15, helper tools for CRI such as CQS (Color Quality Scale) and GAI (Gamut Area Index) also appeared, but none of them caught on.

Light output:
With LED, the 10W on the label tells you only, and only, the power it uses. Lumens are a more correct way to state output. But even that isn't enough. Say both products list 1000 lm (luminous flux, light output). The first question to ask is whether this value belongs to the light source or to the luminaire. For a long time, the whole industry gave the light source's lumen value in its catalogues. (Many still do.) But once the light source goes into a luminaire, the reflector, lens and driver (the total system loss) cut the light that comes out. Some designers and end users who learned about this started to ask “isn't this the luminaire output?” Besides, if we're talking about directed light, we should look at candela values, not lumens, but I won't go into more detail here. In the end, how many consumers or designers really know the subject is a question mark. Two big German companies even went to court over this. (See: http://www.aydinlatma.gen.tr/katalogda-belirtilen-isik-akisi-dava-konusu-oldu.html)

Beam angle:
25 degrees shows the luminaire sits between a narrow and a medium beam. Technically, you could call it the area where the luminous flux drops to 50%. But it tells you nothing about how even the light pool will be. The pool may not be a perfect circle. You may get shapes like butterfly wings. Or it may not be even, in either intensity or colour temperature. A product that is 4000K in the middle may slide to warm white, 3000K, toward the edges, or turn fully yellow. Or the part called "spill light", which should spill over by 10% at most, may cover far more area than it should.

These concepts are data on the product's light quality.

Luminaire Life:
Now say it also lists a life of L70 > 50,000 hours. To talk about this concept, we first have to look at what it is. (Yes, you guessed right: another article.) At its base, it rests on a standard, again from the IES. The IES says: the LED chip manufacturer publishes a report called LM-80. The LM-80 report shows how the chips perform at 25 degrees ambient temperature, in other words in a lab, at 3 different solder point temperatures (the solder point is where the chip joins the PCB). The LM-80 report gives values for 6,000 to 10,000 hours. Then another standard, called TM-21, projects this value into the future. L70 estimates the hour at which the LED chip's luminous flux (lumens) falls to 70%. The estimated hours can't be more than 6 times the hours actually measured. So if you measure for 10,000 hours, you can estimate a life of 60,000 hours. It also states how much colour shift there may be. (By the way, LM-80 came into our lives in 2008, TM-21 in 2011.)

Notice there's no luminaire here at all. This is data for the light source only. When the luminaire manufacturer puts this chip into its own luminaire design, it estimates or measures what the solder point temperature will be. But we're not talking about a test where all the components come together (driver included). For this, the IES again brought out the LM-84 and TM-28 standards in 2014. Just as with the chip, you can get data for the whole system from test results taken every 1,000 hours. The standard even lets you, instead of 6,000 hours, first run a 3,000-hour system test and calculate the remaining 3,000 hours with LM-80 and TM-21. Luminaire manufacturers, though, rarely go near these tests, because chip and driver products change and improve so often.

Yes, this article really does tangle up far more concepts than it should. But doesn't even what you've just read give you an idea of the part of the iceberg you can't see? My point isn't to run LED down. There's no question that it allows, with endless freedom, very different light applications and solutions. But LED was sold to us as “it flies, it runs, it cuts, it jumps, it's Superman”, and I'm trying to explain that it is a meaningful technology only, and only, in the right hands and with the right application. And the right hands are a competent lighting designer and a reliable lighting manufacturer.

If you too say “oh come on, it's all LED, what's the difference, I'll buy the cheapest” and/or “I need neither a lighting designer nor a good manufacturer. My cousin got into this business, I'll buy from him”, let me remind you that what you're holding is a hand grenade. Under “Wild West” conditions there's no control mechanism either, so when it goes off, don't blame LED like the thousands of consumers before you. Look in the mirror.

Emre Güneş

NOTE: Below are the checklists of the lighting design firm Planlux from early 2017. Notice that no item matters less than the others. Each one is important. But you need advanced knowledge just to understand them. The bigger problem is that these standards get updated. 6 months have passed; maybe they should already check whether the tables are still up to date.

Original link to the article: https://agustos.com/vahsi-bati-veya-led-sonrasi-aydinlatma-endustrisi/

I want to be a lighting designer. What should I do?

Sun, 02 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I don't think anyone will be surprised when I say: “I've heard this question so many times that I can't possibly remember how many.” By email, by phone or face to face, I've tried my best to point a great many people, from very different backgrounds, in the right direction. I've helped people find a master's programme, a job or an internship. One person even dreamed one night that they were a lighting designer and knocked on the office door the next morning. I'm glad I've made contributions, big and small, to the careers of many professionals who now work in the industry.

Most recently, when I got the same question again this week, I decided to write a post and share it (maybe what I should have done in the first place). I thought I'd draw the general picture with this post and still help with specific questions.

First, here is what I mean by “architectural lighting designer” in this post: the person who shapes the relationship between a space and its user with light. I never simplify it to the person who does the lighting calculations or decides which luminaires to use. That would be an insult to the profession. Whatever the scale (a villa, a 30,000 m2 mixed-use building or a development at city scale), I assume you want to become the expert people consult on anything to do with “light” in the building process.

With this definition, I want to leave out lighting design for the stage. Even though many of the architectural lighting designers I know today come from a stage background… You could also put “independent” or “brand-independent” in front of the definition as the ultimate goal. But it isn't a must. I don't want to go deeper into that debate here. You can see my take on the idea in this post I wrote a while ago. http://pldturkiye.com/bagimsiz-aydinlatma-tasarimi/

I can't give the same answers to someone who is a student right now and to a professional early in their career or well into it. But the things to research, read, attend or experience are more or less the same. After that, it all depends on your own situation, that is, on what you can afford in time and money.

Within this frame, let's go question by question:

1- Is there one thing I can't do without?

Being in love with light. I don't know what picture of lighting design you have in your head. But the first thing I'll say is meant to kill the romantic side of it: however glamorous it may look, lighting design is a very hard field, and it takes a real fight to earn respect in it. If you aren't in love with light, or don't fall in love with it along the way, I don't think it's easy to do this job for long.

2- Is there a professional prerequisite?

The architectural lighting designers I know usually come from architecture (including disciplines close to it, such as landscape architecture, interior architecture and urban planning) or from electrical engineering. But I also know many designers who come from stage design or who are industrial product designers. So, more than any professional prerequisite, what counts is being able to read architectural plans and having a good grasp of electrical concepts. Whatever you study or whatever job you do today, there's no reason you can't become a lighting designer.

3- Is there a degree for the profession? What are the options for education?

Not yet. As far as I know, there's no 4-year, bachelor's-level programme, either abroad or in Türkiye. But there are 2-year master's programmes dedicated to “architectural lighting design”. For the programmes and their details, look at this micro site: https://pldaeducation.wikispaces.com/05.+LD+Programs PLDA (Professional Lighting Designers' Association), which built the site, closed in April 2014, but I'd say the site is still up to date. If new programmes have been added in the last 3 years, it's up to you to find them.

Personally, I know the teachers who run the programmes and many of their graduates, so I can recommend Parsons in New York, KTH in Sweden and Wismar in Germany. Let me add that Wismar is the most affordable (both for school fees and for living costs). In fact, if you're saying you can't go abroad for 2 years, Wismar now also runs a distance programme. It can be an option if you're a professional who wants to train in this field. Of course, the cost goes up accordingly.

4- Is there no education in Türkiye?

In Türkiye, lighting has so far mostly been seen as a course under building physics and a field to specialise in. So there's no master's programme in architectural lighting design in Türkiye. Various institutions run courses, some of which also give a certificate.

The course ATMK (Aydınlatma Türk Milli Komitesi, the Turkish National Committee on Lighting) runs twice a year: http://pldturkiye.com/atmk-aydinlatma-egitim-semineri/.
The course Philips runs: http://pldturkiye.com/philips-led-aydinlatma-semineri/
The course lighting designer Mustafa Seven runs: http://pldturkiye.com/bilgide-mimari-aydinlatma-tasarimi-egitimi/

Note 1: I think that, apart from ATMK, none of these courses is running at the moment.
Note 2: The information at the links may be out of date. Please check the institutions' own websites.

5- What should I read?

Magazines (Türkiye):
Every issue of PLD Türkiye magazine published so far is free to read online. https://issuu.com/pldturkiye You can read Light World magazine here: https://www.joomag.com/en/newsstand/lightworld-sayi-44-m%C3%9Cze-aydinlatmalari/0904802001490695930

Portals (Türkiye):
PLD Türkiye: http://pldturkiye.com/
Lightworld: https://www.lightworld.com.tr/ (no longer published)
Lighting portal: http://www.aydinlatma.gen.tr/
LED portal: http://www.ledportali.com/ (inactive since 2019)

Magazines (international):
PLD Magazine: https://pld-m.com/en/about-pld/ (stopped publishing in 2018)
Arc Magazine: https://issuu.com/mondiale
Lighting Magazine: http://www.lighting-magazine.com/ (stopped publishing in 2019)

Portals (international):
PLD: https://pld-m.com/en/ (stopped publishing in 2018)
Mondo Arc: http://www.arc-magazine.com/
Lux Review: http://luxreview.com/ (stopped publishing in 2021)
Arch Lighting: http://www.archlighting.com/ (stopped publishing in 2019)

6- Aren't there any workshops?

This is actually the first thing I recommend to everyone who contacts me. You should attend the Lights in Alingsas Workshop. Full stop. It was a turning point for me. I'm sure it was for everyone who took part, too. If you don't like it, at worst you'll find out by the shortest route that this job isn't for you. I could talk for hours about the workshop, held since 2000 in a small Swedish town of 30,000 people. But I already wrote about it at length. You can read it here: http://pldturkiye.com/plda-atolye-calismasi-workshop-nedir/ I took part in 2007, but I don't think it has lost any of its quality. I strongly recommend it.

7- You've gone through it point by point, but where do we start?

That depends on where you are and what you can afford.
I can describe what I see as the ideal case, or what I'd wish for you.

For the ideal case, I assume you're a student right now.

Attend the Alingsas Workshop.
Finish your degree and enrol in a master's programme that fits your budget.
Until you graduate, an internship at an architectural lighting design office in Türkiye would also be very good. For architectural lighting design firms: http://pldturkiye.com/firmalar/aydinlatma-tasarimi-danismanligi/
When you finish your master's, try to find a job abroad first.
Come back with the discipline, knowledge and experience of a lighting design office abroad, and open your own office in Türkiye 5 to 10 years later (again, the timing is up to you). That completes the ideal cycle.

Every other case needs to be looked at on its own.

But let's say (another case I see often) you're working as a professional in another field right now, and your heart is set on becoming a “lighting designer”. Or you think it is. First of all, whoever you are, I'll say it again: attend the Alingsas Workshop.

After that, to build your skills, you can get a first grounding through programmes such as the ATMK course. To do lighting calculations, you can learn Dialux on your own and also attend training programmes. (Search Google for: Dialux training) With this knowledge, your chances are clearly much better when you apply for a job at an architectural lighting design office. Or you can apply to the project departments of companies that manufacture in Türkiye or distribute various brands. In this period, the step before you go independent, you get to know many types of technical product up close and to experience the project phases of architectural lighting design. Again, with the timing up to you, 5 to 10 years later you can open your own office or work at another architectural lighting design office.

To say it again: in this post I set becoming an “independent” architectural lighting designer as the ultimate goal. That in no way makes a designer who falls outside it (one who works for a manufacturer or a distributor) any less of a designer. Being independent only means being free of all the other concerns (sales, profit, stock, product range, and so on and so on). Let me link the old post again: http://pldturkiye.com/bagimsiz-aydinlatma-tasarimi/

I hope this is enough for the general picture.
If anything is missing or wrong, I apologise in advance.
I look forward to your comments and questions.

Emre Güneş

Thinking about lighting design

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 GMT

We in the lighting industry are sitting on a bad legacy. Sadly, nobody values us as much as they should, and everyone we work with remembers us at the very end of construction. When the budget and the time have run out, when the building has taken shape and many details are fixed, someone says: "oh, we also needed to light this place." So the urgent, low-priority lighting ends up expensive (more expensive than it would be if planned from the start) and random. Often it just repeats earlier solutions, with no thought for the details of the new space.

In İstanbul (and I think in Türkiye in general), almost 75% of historic building façades use "amber" and "white" together. Every day we meet these projects on another building, each one a copy of the last. They all have one thing in common: they use LED light sources. For a while I had wondered where this approach came from. It reminds me more of Indian culture, and frankly I don't like it at all. Questions came to mind. Is there such a definition in the literature? Has a general belief formed that this colour choice is the right approach? Is there a technical reason for it that I don't know about?

Then a friend in the industry sent me a message: they felt the same discomfort. So I decided to look at the subject in more detail. After talking to other professionals in the industry and reading the literature, this is my conclusion. Before LED lighting, façades mostly used sodium vapour lamps, because people saw them as energy efficient and good at bringing out the daytime look of the historic fabric. Metal halide lamps, on the other hand, picked out details such as windows and beams and gave depth. With the switch to LED, amber took the place of the sodium vapour colour, and white at 3000K and 4000K colour temperature took the place of metal halide. Once this solution "caught on", it went onto every building.

Frankly, I don't think you need such a big colour split just to bring out the details. You can stay at the same colour temperature and use different light levels. Or the design approach itself can create the difference. Of course, you must judge every work or space on many things: its context, its material details, its history. So I won't fall into the mistake I criticise by declaring one thing "right or wrong", but I am saying there can be other solutions.

In the little time modern life gives us, we all look for quick, simple fixes and ready-made formulas. People ask me "What's the best way to light my home?" or "What's the right solution for bathroom lighting?" For a long time I have given them one answer: "Just think about it." I think we in the lighting industry also need to do some soul-searching and think about "lighting design". Not only on the façades of historic buildings, but in every space we put our name to… Because if we don't care, we can't expect anyone else to care.

Stay with the light until our next issue...

Emre Güneş
PLD Türkiye

Being taken seriously

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 00:00:00 GMT

If you have been writing about one subject for a long time and sharing it on an up-to-date website, Google plays favourites. In many searches on that subject, it puts you in front of the user. So much so that we sometimes rank above some companies' own websites. This is a big advantage for us, but it also brings some awkward situations. As a magazine, we often meet this kind of person: they search Google for a "word", then ask for information through the phone number or e-mail on the contact page of the first site that comes up. So we keep getting requests for the phone number of the company they want to reach, or for the price of a product.

Recently, one of these e-mails we get all the time caught my eye because it was different. A major project management firm, a name we all know, invited us to be a contractor/supplier for an office complex project in Ataşehir. To give you an idea of the size: I'm talking about an office complex with a site area of 20,000 m2 and a total construction area of 89,000 m2. Out of curiosity I went through the attached documents, and I felt a kind of shock I hadn't felt in a long time. The list splits the services under 4 main headings: Real Estate Development and Investment Services, Design Services, Consultancy Services and Contractor&Supplier Services. 88 separate items in total. Some of the items I don't even recognise. For example, "epoxy works".

Now for the real reason for my shock. Forget lighting design (the first thing I looked for): sadly, the word "lighting" did not even appear on the list. As I have written and said many times before, compared with its share of the building materials budget (5-10%), lighting is the industry that adds the most to the user experience. Even so, this project ignored it completely and, I'd guess, hid it behind the electrical item.

When I shared this on LinkedIn, the business social network, a building professional at another major construction firm was surprised by my comment. They told me they thought these were the "main items".

If you work in the lighting industry and you complain about anything (working conditions, price competition and/or quality, whatever it is), know that the root of all your problems lies in these 2 examples.

Our problem is simple: Nobody takes us seriously!

Sadly, until this changes, a better future is not possible for any of us. And the change is in our own hands.

So I ask you: please give part of your time to making people aware. Explain how lighting affects our health. Explain why people learn and work better in well-lit spaces. Explain the link between perception and light. Explain why lighting matters for quality of life. Do it regardless of your brand or your product. If your voice is too quiet on its own, join with others and reach more people. Because if you want to be part of the solution, you have no other choice.

Stay with the light until our next issue.

Emre Güneş
PLD Türkiye

The switch to LED in road lighting

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Our energy minister Taner Yıldız has gone before the public twice in the last year. He said there is a plan to switch road lighting to LED light sources, and that this will bring serious savings. (First story: http://kisalt.com/ledhaber1, second story: http://kisalt.com/ledhaber2)

The first story is dated 5 June 2012, and the details are these: replacing the existing 17 million street lamps, a saving of 500 million TL, a financing model still to be developed so that it puts no burden on the public purse, and a requirement to manufacture in Türkiye. That requirement doesn't mean you have to be a Turkish manufacturer. It means production has to happen in Türkiye. What confused me here was the Minister's line “There is no company in Türkiye that makes LEDs, but they will.”... He must mean LED chips. Otherwise, the chips do come from abroad, but many Turkish companies already make LED luminaires, street luminaires included. At this point I also thought of the Vestel group, which announced last year that it would invest in Türkiye together with Cree. But later I confirmed with Vestel that no such early work existed. All sorts of rumours reached me at the time too: that capital groups close to the government were already planning investments, even that the announcement was based on that... But later, the shared view I took from talks with many different manufacturers was that the process wasn't clear yet, and the subject cooled off for the time being.

The second story is dated 9 November 2012 and is shorter. The details: replacing 6-7 million street lamps, a saving of 350 million TL, and a pilot area already running in Ankara. Six days after this statement, I attended an extended industry meeting called “Energy Efficiency in LED Lighting and the Importance of Design”, organised by İSO (İstanbul Sanayi Odası, the İstanbul Chamber of Industry) and AGİD (Aydınlatma Gereçleri İmalatçıları Derneği, the lighting equipment manufacturers' association). At the meeting, Hayati Çetin, Deputy Director General for Renewable Energy at the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, gave a talk titled “The Place of LED Lighting Technologies in Energy Efficiency Policies and Strategies: Applications in Türkiye”. Mr Çetin shared where energy efficiency stands today and the targets for the future, and he also gave details of the pilot project mentioned in the second story. The meeting went on with other talks, and when the question-and-answer session started, I asked the first question. “Which brand's luminaires did this pilot use? Why this brand? And what happens next?” Mr Çetin said the luminaires were Philips, and that the request for the pilot area had also come from Philips. He added that they want to run the same kind of work with every brand that is interested, and that he wanted to use the occasion to send an open invitation to the industry.

Afterwards, over the meal, we had the chance to talk in detail. I passed on my reservations and my wishes. I spoke about two points. First, especially where LED is concerned, we need a standard, brand-independent setup where the light source is modular, that is, replaceable. Second, when this change moves from the motorways into the cities, it would help to get support from lighting designers too, and to make the process part of a general city lighting plan. In reply, Mr Çetin said they were only 4 months into the work, and that whatever happens, the process will be run transparently.

As things look, we will first wait for the results of this pilot, then follow developments for new pilots. The time frame and scope aren't clear yet, but the work will end in a new lighting regulation. In parallel, as the process moves on, financing models will come out that put no burden on the public purse. As we've seen elsewhere in the world, this change looks set to enter our lives quickly, with the Minister's backing too. As someone who always stands a step back when LED comes up, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried. We'll all live through it and see.

Stay with the light until our next issue…

Emre Güneş
Professional Lighting Design Türkiye

Independent Lighting Design

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The magazine in your hands has been out since 2005. That's no small thing: you're now reading its 44th issue. Back then, the number of firms offering “independent lighting design” consultancy was zero. Today, going by the offices' own declarations, there are 7 (my apologies in advance to any I don't know about). Counting the designers who work in these offices of different sizes, you could say there are 30 to 40 “independent” lighting designers in total. Since day one I've talked about why lighting design matters and why we need lighting design as a profession. So I've faced one question many times: who is an “independent” lighting designer? Who decides what “independent” means, the word I've stressed since the start of this piece? How do we know someone is “independent”?

Let me say my conclusion up front. As I've written a few times before, I still think this can only be defined by a person's own declaration. Any definition set by higher bodies loses its meaning inside professional life, and fast. Before I go on, I also recommend the piece on this subject by lighting designer Mustafa Seven, who is also a dear friend: (Link: http://kisalt.com/seven).

The adjective “independent” is usually read as “brand-independent”. That is, the designer should look after the needs of the project and the interests of the client, and nothing else, throughout the process. Any other motivation damages the designer's “independence”. I want to stress this, because lighting design should not shrink to picking products. Yes, a lighting designer basically decides which products the project will use. But more importantly, they define the relationship between the user and the space at night, in the dark. And in doing that, their most important duty to the user is to create spaces where people feel good. So we should define the job not by engineering calculations alone, or by a purely function-based approach, but by the goal of creating better places to live. That is where the future of lighting design lies anyway. On this point, I recommend Christopher Cuttle's article, which questions lighting standards and offers professionals in the industry a new approach: (in English: http://kisalt.com/cuttle).

Now that I've defined it this way, let's look closer with a few examples. There are two classic cases in front of us, and they hold not just for Türkiye but for the whole world: designers who already work for a distributor or a manufacturer, and designers who call themselves independent lighting designers but take a commission on the products they use.

The designers in the first case also put their names to lighting design projects, but it's very hard to say they look after the needs of the project and nothing else. At the simplest level, their product range is limited to what that one company carries. Even if they can source from other manufacturers or distributors, choosing to do so when they don't have to would be unfair to their own employer, first of all. Stock and sales worries are always in front of them, as a fact of life. Their workload is also much heavier than other designers'. Anyone in the business knows that in our industry, design work is usually free. Almost every project travels a long road between manufacturers and distributors and ends up as a quote. So a designer may sometimes get pulled into more than one project in a single day. And sadly, they see a design they worked on actually get built only a few times a year. A new trend I've been hearing about for a while makes more sense to me. Now a fee is charged for the design, and if the company also supplies the products, the whole design fee comes off the invoice. You could even call this good news, at least because it teaches the client that nothing in this life is free: even when something looks free, its costs are hidden somewhere else.

The situation for the designer in the second case is not very different. Their motivation is shaken at the root, because in today's economy, nobody would find it very strange if they chose the product or brand that pays them more commission. Of course, the realities of life slap us in the face here too. The designer has to explain what they do to clients who have never really made peace with paying for design, and then bill what the service is worth. That is quite a feat. Also, when everyone knows full well that architects work on commission, arguing about commission for lighting designers, who don't even have signing authority yet, is not a very realistic position. Please don't read any of this as me trying to present commission as something reasonable. I'm only trying to take a realistic picture.

Another example, if an extreme one: a lighting designer who says “I only design with LED” is not “independent” to me either. Just like in the other cases, what they focus on is not the user experience or the client's interests.

Being “independent” matters, and it matters too much to be hollowed out for marketing.
It matters, because only then can lighting designers put their names to designs that improve our quality of life and get people talking.
It matters, because only then can the lighting design profession reach the respected place it deserves.
Anyone who achieves this is an “independent” lighting designer to me. The projects they sign prove it anyway.

Stay with the light until our next issue…

Emre Güneş
Professional Lighting Design Türkiye

Again?

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I've lost count of how often I've written it down, spelled it out and talked it through. Back when everyone praised the compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) to the skies and trashed the incandescent lamp, I was the lone voice that kept saying "But wait a minute, let's think a bit more." Not only the lamp manufacturers but also the state (the energy ministry) and the environmental groups (Greenpeace) joined hands and rushed to change our lamps. While they saved our world(!), I stammered "but, but" like a naive child. CFLs contain mercury, and nobody had solved recycling. It was clear that this hysterical switch would hand us a bill we can't pay in the long run. It was no use. We happily swapped out our lamps. (A personal choice. There isn't a single compact fluorescent in my home. I keep a large stock of incandescent lamps, and I recommend you do the same.) Within 5 to 10 years we will all see the results. Statistics on waste collectors who get cancer, or more environmental disasters at landfill sites, will force us to think again. Sadly, by then it will be too late.

Now we face a new era. The LED revolution. LED in front of us, behind us, to our left and to our right. Now the CFL is a big no-no. Marketing documents talk more and more about its mercury and the harm it does to the environment. Please don't take this as me blaming anyone. Marketing is the art of making a case. You have to make the best of the material you have. But we shouldn't conclude that the products on sale work always and everywhere, or that they win in every situation. And with LED in particular, you don't have to offer every client colour change just because LED can do it. If we had used CFLs only where they belonged, I would have had no objection. But no, you said they were right for everything. You said change them. Nobody mentioned that they can't be dimmed, that their life gets shorter outdoors, or that they must not go into closed luminaires. What a waste. We are left with millions of CFLs that will be rubbish in a year or two. Today the same goes for LED.

Once again, all of us will have to live with the results of this aggressive marketing. This time the balance sheet is good for the environment. LED clearly contains no chemicals that harm the environment. The problem is the speed of the switch. The trouble it causes will, in the long run, destroy faith in the industry once again. People talk about hotel projects in Antalya that turned into LED junkyards within 6 months. How will you persuade that bitter client to use LED again? We have historic buildings that our mayors, with Singapore as their model, have turned into fairgrounds. Driving back into the city from the Tüyap exhibition centre on the E5, we now pass kebab houses in every colour on both sides of the road. And there are more of them every day. Our culture never had this many colours, so why the rush to sell LED?

What I'm trying to say is this: The switch will happen. Change is a must. We should move to every new technology over time and with our eyes open. We don't have to rush in, smashing everything on the way. Sometimes our industry starts to look to me like a big halay (a Turkish folk line dance) that tramples whoever gets in front of it. Let's breathe, calm down and act with common sense. That's all I ask. We made this mistake once. Let's not make it again. Please...

Stay with the light until our next issue…

Emre Güneş
Professional Lighting Design Türkiye

Lighting design as a specialist field

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Doğan Hasol published a piece called “İçmimar Mimara Karşı” (Interior Architect Versus Architect) on his personal website in July. I came across it through an email group I subscribe to. (see: http://bit.ly/9HNQEM) In it, Hasol looks at the relationship between the architecture profession and the specialist fields tied to it. His starting point is the criminal complaint that the İç Mimarlar Odası (the Chamber of Interior Architects) filed with the prosecutor's office against architect Kerem Erginoğlu and architect Hasan Çalışlar. When I read the piece with lighting design in mind, the questions I ran into were interesting.

The first thing I noticed is that lighting design doesn't appear as a specialist field at all. Honestly, this doesn't surprise me, and I can't criticise Doğan Hasol for it either. It's obvious we still have a long way to go before lighting design is accepted and recognised as a profession.

Hasol makes this observation in his piece: “In Türkiye, the scope and limits of the architecture profession are being pushed. Architecture is on its way to getting squeezed between side fields and sub-fields whose areas of authority are not clearly set… Urban Planning, Urban Design, Landscape Architecture, Interior Architecture… All these fields, their limits of authority not fully defined, are trying to fit their positions into legal frameworks. But the frameworks are being drawn so wide that in the end it looks as if architects will have no field of work left.”

As the PLDA association, we have been lobbying for some time to get the Lighting Design profession recognised at European Union level. We can see that sooner or later this profession will also be officially recognised, and its lines will have to be drawn. When we get there, will architects have the same worry? In fact, the profession's boundaries don't only overlap with architects. Electrical engineers may feel they have the same problem. Of course, as someone who believes in this profession, I think both groups should pray for a lighting designer on their projects. I'm sure informed professionals will agree. Someone else who takes on the work on your project that nobody owns, nobody takes responsibility for and nobody can bill for... Who could say no to that?

Going back to Hasol's piece, this sentence made me think: “In a working world where even housewives work professionally today, it is not understandable for interior architects to try to shut out architects.” It struck me as odd that, rather than just complaining about the situation he describes, he used such a belittling phrase. Today the same complaint could be made about the lighting design profession too. Who is a lighting designer, and who offers lighting design as an “independent”, is something we argue about as an industry as well. My position on this has been the same from the start. Like Adam Smith said (and like Turgut Özal, who repeated the phrase a lot in Türkiye), I say “Laissez faire, laissez passer”. So if someone today puts “lighting designer” on their business card and says they offer the service independently of any brand, that's good enough for me. I don't think anyone needs to play judge or prosecutor here. It's enough to take the finished projects, and whether someone lasts, as the measure of success. Don't worry: I don't think anyone who can't or won't deliver the service they claim can hold on in these market conditions. Especially for a profession with fewer than 10 practitioners in our country, a fight over who's who, or a logic of weeding people out from day one, won't work.

In the piece, Hasol agrees with an observation by Adil Öngel, head of the İçmimarlar Odası İstanbul branch: “We work together with the architect, but architects have to choose us.” This, too, has to be the motto of lighting designers. I know some lighting designers prefer to work directly with the client. But one thing is certain: on a project where the architect isn't convinced, the doors to working together won't be very open. I also don't think it's very healthy to position the lighting designer as someone the architect hires. The ideal seems to be a lighting designer who sits under the client but works to the architect's brief.

I thank Doğan Hasol for a piece that got me to write about subjects I've wanted to write about for a long time. I should add a note: what I write here are my own thoughts. I think we need to discuss these subjects more, step by step, for the healthy growth of the profession. Please feel free to share your comments.

Stay with the light until our next issue…

Emre Güneş
Professional Lighting Design Türkiye

Ankara’s ribs

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The story goes that a “very” senior official at the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality, on a visit to Kuala Lumpur, comes across some lighting poles they like a lot. The official comes home with one idea: “We should use these modern-looking lighting poles in our capital, Ankara, too.” And so the project enters the city limits. No problem so far. But what happened next is a great mystery, because the process is run in such a way that when you look at the results, you are left somewhere between laughing and getting angry. The result is very clear: a disaster that happened while bringing a trend the world follows to Türkiye…

The use of aluminium in lighting poles and flagpoles keeps growing around the world too. Its strength, easy installation, light weight, the way it takes different surface finishes, and its long life (its resistance to corrosion) give it very big advantages over the galvanised steel and concrete poles in common use. These products can be made in Türkiye too. So I am not questioning whether the choice was right. It started from a very good point. But in the implementation, the mistakes were so big that you cannot miss the fact that nobody managed the process professionally. And once again it shows how important it is for municipalities to have expert lighting teams on their staff.

I went back to Ankara, both to see it on site once more and to take some photos. To give you a sense of the project's size, I should share one fact: with the Eskişehir road, the road to Esenboğa airport, and works still going on at different points in the city, we are talking about roughly 3,500 to 5,000 lighting poles. And so far only 2 of Ankara's entrances are done. Once it spreads to all the entrances, the number will reach 20,000. I talked about this with many people in different settings. I want to share with you the problems I saw and could pull together.

Design:
With their aluminium structure, the poles look very modern. The curves look stylish at first, but you can tell nobody studied the project closely enough on the technical side. Across most of the project, the luminaires reach over two lanes of the road they light. This makes the maintenance that has to be done from time to time very hard. On a three-lane road, closing two lanes for maintenance is dangerous for both traffic and people's safety. Also, because of problems during installation, the poles are out of line. You can see that some stand further out, or the other way round, further in, and they do not form a straight line.

Lamp use:
Going round the project, you can't help getting this feeling. It is as if some facts came to light as the project went on, and people made changes to fit them. For example, the luminaires on the Esenboğa airport road are fitted with 600 Watt, but elsewhere they are not. Also, the luminaires in this section can take 400 Watt at most, yet 600 Watt lamps went in, so their ballasts did not fit in the luminaire. They were put in the cover compartment at the bottom of the pole instead. That means 12 to 13 metres between ballast and lamp, and a voltage drop over that distance, which shortens the lamp's life. This mistake pushes up maintenance and running costs, one of the biggest costs of all. And on top of that, there is the danger of roads left dark when nobody does regular maintenance and repair.

Vandalism:
It looks as if nobody took any measure against vandalism. I saw many poles with their covers stolen. Sadly, they stand there with the covers open and the electric cables hanging out, a very big danger.

Quantity:
For modern road lighting on ME1, ME2 class roads, the C.I.E standards point to 45 to 50 metres between two poles. (Provided you use quality luminaires that meet the standards and have a high protection class.) In Ankara, the spacing we see is 27 to 30 metres. So you can't help thinking that they used more poles than needed. Another sign is the pointless pedestrian lighting poles… They are even in areas pedestrians do not use! It is so funny: some of them are left switched off, because the billboards right next to them already light the area enough. Or, as on the Eskişehir road, separate lighting poles went up just for a single-lane road where shuttles and public transport drop off and pick up passengers, which makes no sense at all. The logic "the bigger the project, the better" shouts at you from every corner. Even though I want to keep my good faith, I can't help being surprised. It is as if either nobody did any calculation, or somebody did it with very bad intent.

Technical:
I could give examples one by one, but in general we see a zebra effect across the project. That is, many drivers pass through light and dark areas, one after the other. This is a big danger for driving safety. It is the perfect setting for drivers both to lose focus and to fall asleep. There are also areas with glare, and spots in the middle of the road where the light bursts out like a floodlight. The funniest part, and I still find it hard to understand: as you go round, you see some poles standing in senseless ways. Ones that have ended up side by side, ones at an absurd angle, and so on. This comes from mistakes the installation company made when anchoring the poles. In strong winds the anchor wedges break, and the poles shift direction and position with the wind. They say maintenance crews find and fix poles like these around the city almost every night. Maintenance costs go up too.

As I said, these are the things that caught my eye on my short trip… A deeper study could bring up other problems too. In short, the oddities in this project are endless. How did such an important project of a city, and the country's capital at that, end up like this? I think the whole process needs a new review from start to finish. Let it be reviewed, so that nobody makes such grave mistakes again.

Change a lamp and let the world change… If only…

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

First Australia decided to ban incandescent lamps (the light bulb, as most people call it). Then the UK, Ireland, Canada and other countries followed, and in the end the European Union (EU) followed the same decision… Here in Türkiye: the energy efficiency campaign, the launch of ENVER, the "one lamp, one tree" and "one million lamps, one Keban" comparisons (Keban is one of Türkiye's biggest hydroelectric dams) that you heard everywhere, and energy-saving lamps handed out for free… A fast change, all within two or three years. So what has really changed in this short time? And the real question: where is this change taking us?

Look at it and you see a very, very fast process, all within 2 or 3 years. The bulb that Edison invented 120 years ago is banned, and energy-saving lamps take its place. What happened? How did a simple technology, unchanged for so many years, suddenly become the whole world's arch-enemy and, with a bit of exaggeration, the only culprit of global warming?

It all started with a simple calculation that pushed every country to act fast. The incandescent lamp (let's call it the bulb from here on) is, as we said, a simple thing: a metal gets very hot and starts to give off light. That is why it wastes 80% of the energy it uses. Energy-saving lamps in general, that is fluorescent lamps with integrated ballast (compact fluorescent lamps, let's call them CFLs from here on), have a more complex structure. Electricity passes between the electrodes at the two ends, and the mercury and phosphor inside the tube turn it into light. And unlike the bulb, they give "more" light for the electricity they use. That is why people call them the more energy-saving lamps. When you make certain conditions equal and accept some assumptions, this efficiency gap even reaches 80%. This simple calculation leads every sensible person to the same decision. Under these conditions, why would we use the bulb at all? Let's get rid of these energy monsters, let's explain this to the public, and if that's not enough, better still, let's ban these lamps.

To see that the process was not this simple, we had to hear some dissenting voices. The first ones came from lighting designers. The article by Gad Giladi in issue 21 of our magazine (October-November 2008) was the best organised and clearest of them. In short, Giladi questioned the arguments behind the ban. He drew attention in particular to the mercury in CFLs, small as the amount is, and to what we need to do to recycle it. (You can read the full article at this link: http://issuu.com/pldturkiye/docs/sayi-21/72)

In the same period, though nobody knows exactly where they came from, more and more people started to get emails like the one you can see in the article: What to do if a CFL breaks… These emails carried radiation and poison symbols, and what they said was simple but frightening. They said that if a CFL broke for any reason, the mercury inside would mix into the air, and that this could cause some diseases, cancer first among them. Consumers were confused.

Meanwhile, here in Türkiye, the ENVER campaign made the subject a real part of our lives. Maybe because I am inside the industry, maybe it was selective perception, but for a while I ran into a new statement from our Energy Minister Hilmi Bey every other day. He talked all the time about the "one tree, one lamp" equation, built on the simple calculation I mentioned at the start, and a lot about the Keban Dam. He also talked about energy-saving lamps handed out for free, a system used in Türkiye (and, I think, only in Türkiye).

Hilmi Bey started from one of the most basic ideas in marketing: he simplified the message and made it easy to understand. He is not the first. Around the world, many people and organisations, Greenpeace first among them, have done the same. And these days, when speed has taken over every part of our lives, you could even say he did the right thing. But our example will show that this message, sadly by its nature, can lose its meaning as it gets simpler. It can even become dangerous. And in my view, the situation is now so frightening that we must act as soon as we can: to give this message correctly again, and to take the steps we are already late to start.

Why?

- Saving energy is not just changing a lamp. Replacing the right lamp with the right lamp matters too.

CFLs save energy. True. As long as you use them under the right conditions, of course… The lifetimes printed for energy-saving lamps assume a lot of fixed conditions: laboratory conditions (room temperature), switched on once a day, and on for four hours a day. If you use them somewhere these conditions don't hold, that lifetime gets shorter. This cancels out the energy the CFL would save, or cuts it a lot. So, for example, I can guarantee you that the big energy-saving lamps the döner shops I saw on Taksim Square hang outdoors won't last very long. Or take the CFLs you use in a room you only step in and out of, a corridor or a storeroom: they will sadly end up in the bin well before the lifetime written on the box. (Don't throw them in the bin, by the way, but I'll come to that later.) Also, CFLs are not really recommended for closed luminaires, and you can't dim every CFL. These are some of their other known drawbacks. To be fair, there are also CFLs made for frequent switching, for dimming, or for cold conditions. But as I said, when the message gets simpler, facts like these sadly slip out of sight. Another painful example from the public sector: this year the Prime Minister issued a circular to change the lamps in public buildings, and the estimate was only about a third of the number of lamps changed in the end. 1.8 million lamps were changed; the first estimate was around 600 thousand. So the decision to change 1.2 million lamps is open to question.

- Saving energy is not just changing a lamp. It is replacing the right lamp with a quality lamp.

When a subject gets this popular, the Turkish entrepreneur sees an opportunity. As CFLs grew more popular, it is no surprise that people who wanted to turn this into easy money brought in, to put it plainly, poor-quality cheap Chinese goods. (I say poor-quality, cheap Chinese goods on purpose, because where a product is made does not decide its quality: every brand makes its CFLs in China.) An email I got about four or five months ago showed that we were not late on this front either. A sharp operator, with his name, surname and mobile number at the bottom, wrote that he had 129,000 energy-saving lamps of brand X and wanted to sell them. A small photo, taken with a mobile phone on a counter or a table, was the only picture in the email. A month later came another email, this time straight from China, and funnily enough it tried to sell me the same brand of lamps. Of course, once again, as the message got simpler, the stress on quality disappeared. Everyone forgot that a consumer who already has to pay more up front than for a bulb may slide to the cheaper option.

- Saving energy is not just changing a lamp. Good lighting design works far better than changing lamps.

Doesn't it make more sense to you, too, to get rid of the lamps we don't need than to replace the ones we have with more efficient ones? In other words, shouldn't we ask the real question first: do we really need that lamp? Or do we have to keep the same light level all the time in a space that serves different uses through the day? Couldn't we adjust these levels with lighting automation?

An expert lighting designer can give you the best answer to these questions and others like them. The lighting designer is responsible for defining the relationship between the space and its user in the best way. In the same way, the lighting designer is responsible for the energy the system uses over its life, for the maintenance costs and for planning them. We must look at each system on its own terms and make the right choices for its needs, priorities and means. Believe me, this process improves the system's efficiency far more than just changing lamps.

- Saving energy is not just changing a lamp. It is recycling the lamp at the end of its life.

Yes, let's come to why I told you near the start not to throw these lamps in the bin. For those who don't know: CFLs contain mercury. (Some brands now use amalgam instead of mercury.) In good brands it is around 2 mg, but in poor-quality products it can be over 6 mg (in old fluorescent lamps it was around 15 mg). The EU standard, for now, is 3 mg. So if a CFL breaks in your home, you may need to take some precautions, such as airing the room and not using a vacuum cleaner. (Again, some brands use technologies that stop the mercury from escaping when the lamp breaks.) And yes, these lamps must go into recycling at the end of their life (this applies to every brand). But the same recycling applies to many other products too, like the batteries we use at home. So while we worry about lamps, we can't ignore batteries or any electronic product that contains substances harmful to nature. As AGİD's statement says, these systems must be set up for all products under the European Union WEEE Directives.

What is frightening is this: Türkiye has companies that work in recycling, but sadly there is no solution yet when it comes to compact fluorescent lamps. (Or I just don't know about it. If anyone has information on this, I would be very glad to hear from them.)

Under the ENVER campaign, close to 10 million CFLs will be handed out. With that in mind, you can see why I am worried. The interesting part is that, America aside, Türkiye is not far behind the rest of the world on this. America has a much wider recycling network for this, while Europe is still crawling. America, rightly in my view, turned the subject into a business. It made recycling a commodity, and an industry grew out of it: companies that collect and recycle lamps, and, as their numbers grew, even an association of them. In parallel, America launched the "Energy Star" programme, backed and owned by the environment ministry, NGOs, lamp manufacturers and recycling companies. With it, America has started to raise public awareness and has managed to spread recycling. Giant chains like IKEA and Wal-Mart must take back dead lamps and send them for recycling. Yet apart from smaller programmes in Germany and Switzerland, many countries across Europe are at least as much "in the dark" on this as we are. It is not much to celebrate, but it does show we are not too late. Türkiye, too, must urgently analyse the situation correctly, decide the steps to take, bring the institutions involved together, and set up programmes like "Energy Star". And there is a job in this for all of us.

One thing is clear: we don't have the luxury of not using energy-saving lamps. With the threat of global warming and our limited energy resources, we have to use energy efficiently. So we should use CFLs and encourage their use. But we must explain how to use them correctly with just as much care, and we must not wipe out the details for the sake of a simpler message.

So, the time to change "the message" has come, and it is already slipping away. It is a bit long, but here it is:

Saving energy means replacing the right lamp, chosen within good lighting design, with the right quality lamp, and sending lamps at the end of their life into recycling...

Emre Güneş
Editor, Professional Lighting Design Türkiye magazine
Professional Lighting Designers’ Association Representative for Türkiye

Sources:

http://www.energystar.gov/

http://www.almr.org/

http://www.savethebulb.org/

http://www.banthebulb.org/

Statements on the subject:

Aydınlatma Gereçleri İmalatçıları Derneği (AGİD, the Turkish association of lighting equipment manufacturers)

The efficient use of energy has become a subject that countries around the world have focused on closely, especially in recent years. The reasons are limited energy resources, problems in energy supply and a number of environmental concerns.
In today's world, electrical energy is essential for economic and social development. Demand for electricity grows year after year. Governments, social institutions, companies and private initiatives develop projects and bring out products so that people use it efficiently in industry, in services, in homes and in every other area one could list. Lighting, where people use electricity heavily, sees many similar initiatives.

A study by the International Energy Agency (IEA) states that lighting uses 19% of the electricity consumed in the world. For Türkiye, a study by İstanbul Technical University put this figure at about 25%. When you consider all the areas, large and small, where daily life uses electricity, this figure for lighting deserves attention.

For this reason, energy efficiency in lighting has come a little more to the front than other energy efficiency measures, because it is easy to apply and costs relatively little. Because of the developments above, lighting companies today develop energy-efficient lighting products and solutions fast and bring them to market. Today you can find energy-efficient lighting solutions in many places, from home lighting to office lighting, from road lighting to shop lighting.

These solutions range from simply changing a single lamp to using complex lighting control systems. Home lighting uses a large share of the electricity consumed for lighting. Here, both governments and lamp companies try to encourage the quickest and cheapest way to save electricity: just changing the lamp.

Home lighting today still mostly uses incandescent lamps. But because of the way they work, incandescent lamps turn only a very small part of the electricity they use into light, and waste the rest as heat. So one can easily say that incandescent lamps waste a lot of energy. Compact fluorescent lamps with integrated ballast, a technology that goes back about 15 years, are the solution here. They can take the place of incandescent lamps and give the same light level with about 80% energy saving.

Use of compact fluorescent lamps with integrated ballast has grown extremely fast in recent years, both in Türkiye and around the world.

As use grew this much, questions and doubts about these lamps naturally came with it. The first thing people question is the harm that the mercury in these lamps does to human health and to the environment. But we must not forget that compact fluorescent lamps with integrated ballast, which came to market about 15 years ago, are not a new technology in themselves. They are a reshaped form of tubular fluorescent lamps, which first went on commercial sale in 1938. So the mercury that fluorescent lamps need to work has been part of our daily lives since then. For this reason, it is not a correct approach to raise the harm of mercury to human health and the environment as if it were a problem of compact fluorescent lamps with integrated ballast. Another important point is the progress in the amount of mercury in low-pressure mercury vapour lamps, the product group that includes both tubular and compact fluorescent lamps.

Lamp manufacturers work seriously to bring the mercury in lamps down to a minimum, in line with technological progress and with international regulations that protect the environment and human health. Fluorescent lamps that held around 15mg of mercury 5 to 10 years ago now hold less than 2 mg.

By the way they work, gas discharge lamps need different elements. Mercury is one of them, and with today's technology it is not possible to bring the mercury gas in gas discharge lamps down to zero.

Another issue raised in recent years is the disposal and recycling of used compact fluorescent lamps with integrated ballast. But the point to underline here is that these lamps must be handled under the WEEE ( Waste of Electrical and Electronic Components ) standard, which also covers all other electrical and electronic devices. In other words, the issue is not only the disposal and recycling of fluorescent lamps with integrated ballast. It is the disposal and recycling of harmful substances in all electrical and electronic devices. Given the work and progress on this in Türkiye so far, there is a clear need for action, especially by government bodies, and for someone to coordinate the work.

Finally, designers in particular have raised a criticism: compact fluorescent lamps with integrated ballast cannot equal incandescent lamps in where you can use them, how they behave in use and the quality of their light, so these lamps cannot fill the gap a ban on incandescent lamps will leave.

It is true that incandescent lamps work on a completely different principle from compact fluorescent lamps, so their light characteristics and properties are not the same. But lamp manufacturers today have taken these concerns and needs into account. They have widened their compact fluorescent ranges a lot, in design, in light colour and in how you can use them, and with future needs in mind they are putting more weight on new product development.

Today you can easily find compact fluorescent lamps with integrated ballast on the market in many different shapes and sizes, in different light colours, and able to work on dimming circuits. Despite all these developments and alternatives, some consumers still won't give up the light of incandescent lamps, and companies carry other energy-saving solutions in their ranges for them. Energy-saving halogen lamps, on the market for the last few years, save between 30% and 50%. They do not use energy as efficiently as compact fluorescents, but they can be a good solution for consumers who look at lighting from other angles.

It is a fact that compact fluorescent lamps with integrated ballast, proven to meet certain internationally accepted standards, give the greatest benefit to both end users and the environment when you use them in the right place and in the right way. One can say that this benefit would rise much higher if government bodies urgently put in place the legal and environmental rules needed for all equipment and devices that contain substances harmful to the environment.

Elektrik İşleri Etüt İdaresi (EİE, the Turkish state Electrical Power Resources Survey and Development Administration)

As we all know, all fluorescent lamps (compact lamps included) contain mercury. Technically, they are all called low-pressure mercury vapour lamps.

In recent years, the phosphor layer inside the glass tube has become more efficient with UV light, so tubes have become thinner and their mercury content has gone down. But they still contain mercury in the range of 1 to 2 milligrams.

Their danger comes from mercury being toxic. At the end of their life, these lamps must be collected at dedicated centres, and the mercury inside must be recovered before it spreads into the atmosphere and before any living thing breathes it in.

Türkiye does not yet have such centres or practices.

Derya Aydemir

Electrical Engineer
Elektrik İşleri Etüt İdaresi

Greenpeace Statement

To save the climate, the first step must be to ban waste bulbs

At Greenpeace, we argue that the sale of incandescent bulbs, which we call "waste bulbs", must stop all over the world as soon as possible. In Türkiye, too, the government must ban waste bulbs as soon as possible. The reason is simple. Every year, incandescent bulbs put millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for nothing. Now that we have CFLs, the efficient bulbs, nobody should keep insisting on waste bulbs that are past their use-by date. In short, if we want to save our world from the effects of climate change, we must push energy efficiency as high as it can go. Efficient bulbs must be part of this rescue operation.

According to Greenpeace's roadmap called Energy Revolution, which covers the period from 2007 to 2050, a ban on waste bulbs could cut carbon dioxide emissions by up to 5% worldwide. And this is probably the easiest of all energy efficiency standards to put into practice. Today energy-saving bulbs cost more than ordinary incandescent bulbs, but they use less electricity and last longer, so they also save the consumer money.
As for the mercury in efficient bulbs: at Greenpeace, before we set our position on these bulbs, we thought the mercury issue through carefully. This was our conclusion: 50% of the world's mercury pollution comes from thermal power stations. And the amount of mercury in efficient bulbs keeps going down. If we look at it from an environmental point of view, we should choose the option with the lowest environmental cost. According to data from the US Environmental Protection Agency, the mercury pollution you put into the atmosphere with a waste bulb reaches 6 milligrams, while the effect of an energy-saving bulb stays below 2 milligrams. This proves that using more electricity, which means burning more coal (in thermal power stations, to make electricity), is indirectly the dirtier choice.

Hilal Atıcı

Greenpeace Mediterranean
Climate and Energy Campaigner

A Culture of Debate

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

We are not a society with a culture of debate. It's not that we don't like to argue. But saving the country at the rakı table or in the coffeehouses every day, or always having some opinion on any subject, sadly isn't enough… At the most basic level, we debate the way fans back a football team. Worse, our debates don't rest on research or knowledge. They rest on things we've heard, even second-hand, and on scraps of information we understood from one point of view but never questioned. So our debates don't reach a conclusion either. What is going on today around the Bosphorus Bridge lighting project is an example of this. You can debate whether the money spent will give value in return, or the tender process. But comments that the colours used will cause accidents or encourage suicide are laughable. With a little research, you could learn that the “default” colour and look that will stay on all the time has not been decided yet. You could also learn that the municipality has set up a commission on this, made up of the highways authority, universities, architects and colour scientists. It also matters to know that, thanks to the LED technology used in the project, every existing colour can be produced and many different scenarios can be run.

Setting all that aside, whatever its quality, it's good that this subject is being debated in various media. Because people don't know what can be done with light. We need to talk about light and what it can do. The more we talk and debate about light and lighting, and the more events we hold, the wider the audience we can make aware. Raising our public's interest in lighting and showing them what's right is the duty of all of us in the lighting industry. An aware public will make demands. It will want its neighbourhood, its streets and its squares, in short the city it lives in, to be lit correctly. That's why it made me very happy that Beyazıt Öztürk criticised the project on his own show (which reaches a large audience), and that the Referans newspaper gave a full page to these debates. What needs to happen now is for the people who worked on the project, Karayolları (the Turkish highways authority), the Aydınlık company and Philips, to repeat the facts of the project together in every channel they can, and to try to reach more people. We at PLD are proud to be the first place where you could find the project's technical details.

You've met the LUCI (Lighting Urban Communities International) association in many issues of our magazine. It grew from the idea of sharing experience for better lighting, so its mission is clearly right. İstanbul too has applied to join this network, which 60 municipalities around the world take part in. While the process goes on, I was invited to Paris for the “City under microscope” event that LUCI holds twice a year, together with İstanbul Municipality's Director of City Lighting and Energy, Muhammet Garip Bey. The event took place in April, and its content and participants made it very interesting. You'll find my impressions in the pages ahead.

In his piece, PLD's editor-in-chief Joachim shares his views on the education of lighting designers. Right now there's a growing demand for lighting designers around the world (Türkiye included). It's hard not to agree, but we need to look at the situation in Türkiye specifically. For that, we'll have to wait for the next issue…

Lighting designs that don't (or can't) change

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:00:00 GMT

None of us has Afro hair today (except the curly-wigged family from the Bonus Card ads), and we have no bell-bottoms or thick sideburns either. All of that was in fashion in the 80s, and today the 80s are some 20 years behind us. We don't listen to the same music anymore, we don't crave the same flavours, and our tastes aren't the same either… In short: Trends have changed, and they keep changing…

Change is part of our lives. Technology changes day by day, aesthetics from era to era… So in all this commotion, how far can we talk about permanence in lighting design, which is born from the union of aesthetics and technology? In defiance of Heraclitus, who said “The only thing that never changes is change itself”, are there lighting designs that don't (or can't) change? A hard question.

So we gave this issue of our magazine to the mental gymnastics this hard question calls for.

Two projects that are milestones of modern lighting design bring colour to our magazine: the Seagram Building, which graces New York, and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris… The Institut du Monde Arabe matters especially for its design, which refers to multiculturalism, and for the message it can give today's world, where ideas like “the clash of civilisations” are up for debate. Beyond these, a fine example from our own day: the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart sums up 120 years of car history for us, and it dazzles with its modern lighting design too. Ankara Palas, the CHP headquarters, the Kayseri Park shopping centre, the ABT Tekstil head office, Kanyon and the McCann ad agency are the projects we added from Türkiye.

Aydan Hacaloğlu İlter, whose views we asked for, questions modern lighting design, while Yılmaz Zenger links design with expectations.

We are a team that set out to support independent lighting designers and to be a platform for lighting design. So nothing made us happier than Garanti Bankası using the symbol of “light” as the concept for its 60th anniversary celebrations, and gracing its head office and many of its branches with modern lighting designs. Once again, we send our congratulations to everyone who worked on this project…

As we read dear Joachim celebrating PLD's 50th issue, it struck us: we too have just two issues left until our second anniversary… Now, as we roll up our sleeves for our new issue, we know the time has come to take stock of these two years. We set out on this road saying “We don't know if we were dreamers”, and we have reached a point that puts a smile on each of our faces. Now it's time to build on these efforts, maybe even take them to the next level… All together…

Stay with the light until our next issue…