A Look At Lighting Trends
By Facility Executive
From the April 2025 Issue
There’s more to lighting than making a space visible—it’s a critical component when creating a workplace environment. In the quest to find optimal lighting setups, more facilities are embracing networked lighting controls as a solution for real-time energy and occupancy monitoring and to promote healthier buildings overall. These solutions enable facility managers to create automated lighting schedules and accommodate various sun lighting conditions to help building occupants feel more comfortable in a space.
Additionally, facilities are looking at lighting solutions to help with energy management. LED lighting can be used to create a welcoming vibe and set the tone for the atmosphere of a space. And in today’s environment, more spaces are designed to adapt to various lighting needs. In some cases, more facilities are implementing a unified control lighting interface to connect both indoor and outdoor lighting.
To learn more about the latest in lighting design trends and about working as a lighting designer, Facility Executive spoke with Jennifer Brons, with the Light and Health Research Center at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Brons will be teaching a course on lighting design later in 2025 to help professionals in lighting gain cutting-edge knowledge and advance their careers.
Facility Executive: When did you first get into lighting design? Tell us about what it’s like being a lighting designer.
Jennifer Brons: I became interested in lighting design after going to architecture school. I temporarily took a job in electrical contracting, working in an office in the San Francisco Bay area. This role involved working with high-end homes; when people have huge houses, they have lighting designers that work with the architecture team. Their job is to enhance the goals of the project and to support whatever the architect is trying to achieve in terms of how they want a person to feel when they walk in a space. What impressions do they want building visitors to have? We need to consider how lighting various surfaces in the environment can draw eyes to a certain place or provide a certain impression. The background of lighting design is that it came from the theater—we’re trying to evoke emotion and tell a story. We’re not the project directors, but we manage the lighting aspect.
It’s the architect or the leader of the team that wants to create an impression, and make it maintainable, practical, and energy efficient. There are requirements we must factor in when we’re deciding what kind of lighting to put in. We make our recommendations to the team, then we work with electrical engineers to develop panel schedules, such as if load balancing is needed, and to discuss lighting controls.
A lighting designer is doing a lot of different tasks, ranging from factoring in aesthetics to considering technical tasks. They’re an advocate for a client, the property owner, and the facility manager. Lighting designers work to ensure designs are flexible enough to meet occupant needs and are easy to maintain.
FE: As a lighting designer for over 20 years, how has lighting evolved overtime?
Brons: The technology has improved so much and has given us a lot more flexibility. Visual standards haven’t really changed, in terms of how much light is needed to promote vision in our interiors, but the technology we use has changed from fluorescents to now LED everything.
There’s so much flexibility in how LEDs can be arranged and hidden away in architecture. Maintenance and facilities teams are not changing light bulbs as much anymore due to new lighting fixtures, so we can hide light sources into places that are more difficult to get into.
Overall, from the lighting design perspective, the change in technology to LEDs has allowed for new products and product lines and innovation cycles that are much quicker. Facility teams can also have LEDs shipped from all over the world and can develop new products more easily than before.
With new innovations, facility management teams over time may have a trickier time replacing certain parts or keeping up with a cohesive appearance over the years. Some lighting manufacturers update product lines or change hands.
To combat this, more companies are choosing to buy extra inventory (“attic stock”) to have on hand. If a fixture fails prematurely, the facility manager can immediately replace it, then seek warranty replacement with less urgency.
FE: In addition to having lighting fixture replacements available, what are some other strategies for challenges that facilities might face when it comes to lighting?
Brons: As states adopt stricter energy codes, companies are bringing in more lighting controls to limit energy use and power demand. We’re going to see more of a need to combine systems in our buildings.
Electrical demand management is another trend to consider today. At a regional level, utilities are going through periods of either a daily demand peaks, or emergencies (such as weather extremes) that cause extremely high electrical demand.
Utilities are starting to reward the use of demand management systems; lighting controls can now dim down your lights, say, by 20% or step back or HVAC system by a few degrees in those times of peak demand.
You need a whole control system that can take a signal from your utility and then talk to all these other components in your building. That’s thinking of the building as an ecosystem. Lighting can connect to these integrated systems and plug into the whole community, so demand management is going to be increasingly important.
For more information about distance learning courses in the Fall, see the Light and Health Research Center’s Outreach Education page.
Do you have a comment? Share your thoughts in an e-mail to the Editor at jen@groupc.com.
