Tailored Lighting

Uniform horizontal illumination has traditionally been the goal of industrial lighting systems. However the visual needs and priorities of these spaces are often not uniform. Localized areas often require relatively higher levels of illumination to support tasks requiring higher levels of visibility, to accentuate, or to provide functional differentiation.

Activities involving exacting visual tasks tend to dictate light level requirements and yet they commonly occur in only a finite number of localized areas. Providing this relatively high level of illumination throughout the entire space is generally unnecessary and represents a significant waste of energy. Auxiliary task lighting is often incorporated to provide localized illumination, but this type of equipment is rarely as efficacious as the general lighting system and fails to adequately exploit the overall opportunity. However, it is easy to imagine a general lighting system so versatile that it allows these needs to be reduced, or even eliminated, while leveraging the full energy-saving potential of lighting that has been specifically tailored to the application. This is tailored lighting, and it's not a new idea. Professional lighting designers have long understood the virtues of non-uniform illumination, energy-savings aside.

In retail spaces, lighting is often used to provide visual differentiation and localized accents. The magnitude of the resulting contrast can be as, or more important than the absolute light level. This is also true of lighting equipment employed to augment architectural features, direct traffic flow, or provide a “sense of place” among functional areas. Relatively high levels of uniform ambient illumination act to diminish intentional efforts to accent or visually differentiate one area from another and lead to heavy use of auxiliary equipment as a means of overcoming the unnecessarily high background light level.

Tailored lighting is a design strategy that aspires to provide the proper amount of light at different respective locations based on varying visual needs. Doing so can obviously yield significant energy savings, but it can also improve the quality and effectiveness of the lighting system. Luminaires are strategically placed and beams are individually adjusted to precisely create the desired distribution of illumination. Narrower photometric distributions and closer spacing provide accent and high level task illumination while wide photometric distributions combined with broader spacing provide adequate illumination for general use areas and visual tasks of high contrast and/or large size.

Not only do most large spaces have non-uniform lighting needs, but times change, and so do the uses and arrangement of most interior environments. Assembly lines are reconfigured, interior walls may be added or removed, featured items cycle, and display locations may also be variable. Clearly, such changes impact lighting needs and priorities, and yet even the common term “light fixture” implies a static system. Specificity and versatility are core tailored lighting concepts and the luminaires that do it best have been carefully designed to quickly and accurately accomodate most any need. Stingray Energy Systems is proud to offer a variety of lighting products that exhibit just these attributes.