Lighting Design: A Perception-Based Approach

By reading this book, you will develop the skills to perceive a space and its contents in light, and be able to devise a layout of luminaires that will provide that lit appearance.

Written by renowned lighting expert Christopher (Kit) Cuttle, the book:

• explains the difference between vision and perception, which is the distinction between providing lighting to make things visible, and providing it to influence the appearance of everything that is visible;
• demonstrates how lighting patterns generated by three-dimensional objects interacting with directional lighting are strongly influential upon how the visual perception process enables us to recognize object attributes, such as lightness, colourfulness, texture and gloss;
• reveals how a designer who understands the role of these lighting patterns in the perceptual process may employ them either to reveal, or to subdue, or to enhance the appearance of selected object attributes by creating appropriate spatial distributions of light;
• carefully explains calculational techniques and provides easy-to-use spreadsheets, so that layouts of lamps and luminaires are derived that can be relied upon to achieve the required illumination distributions.

Practical lighting design involves devising three-dimensional light fields that create luminous hierarchies related to the visual significance of each element within a scene. By providing you with everything you need to develop a design concept - from the understanding of how lighting influences human perceptions of surroundings, through to engineering efficient and effective lighting solutions – Kit Cuttle instills in his readers a new-found confidence in lighting design.

Christopher Cuttle, MA, FCIBSE, FIESANZ, FIESNA, FSLL, is a lighting designer, educator, and author who lives in New Zealand. He gained broad experience of lighting in the UK before taking up academic positions in New Zealand (Senior Lecturer in schools of architecture in Wellington and Auckland) and in the USA (Head of Graduate Education in Lighting at the Lighting Research Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York). His books Lighting by Design (2003, 2^nd edition 2008), and Light for Art’s Sake (2007), are both published by Routledge.