Can the design intent we set on Day One be sustained years later? Ellis Mandia presents at the Lighting Innovation Summit, Abu Dhabi

dpa Associate Ellis Mandia was invited to speak at the Lighting Innovation Summit in Abu Dhabi on 9 September, presenting to an audience of lighting consultants, government representatives, architects, engineers and urban designers.

His talk, “Advancing Outdoor Lighting Excellence”, went back to the root of the word sustainability, the capacity to be maintained or kept going over time, and turned it into a single question for lighting: can the design intent we set on day one be sustained years later? Ellis argued that as an industry we measure what a scheme consumes, and almost never whether the light itself survives the environment it is installed in.

The session was a refresher on how to read a lifespan declaration correctly, covering the L value, the B value, the projected hours, and the temperature those numbers were tested at, and why a figure produced in a 25°C laboratory says very little about performance on a building in the Gulf. That responsibility sits with the specifier. Nobody else in the process is going to interrogate those numbers, so it falls to designers to understand what is actually being declared and to use it to their advantage when selecting products, so the intent set at the start can still hold years later.

We cannot change the climate we build in, but we can change what we ask before we specify.