Lighting design research formally began at Parsons in 1987 with completion of the first Master thesis titled “Lighting Education in Schools of Architecture.” As home to the first graduate level degree of its type in the world, it is fitting that Parsons’ early lighting research interest focused on the status of the emerging field of architectural lighting education. In subsequent years and continuing today, Parsons has expanded our Lighting Design research agenda to have a more outward focus that includes broader topics that impact the field of lighting design as it is currently defined. More recently, Parsons’ lighting design research, including the master’s thesis work, addresses broader questions on the role of light in relation to other disciplines within the constructed environment and the potential of light and lighting design to respond to the most challenging questions facing our society and culture.

Explorations of Evidence-Based Design for Lighting

Evidence-Based Design (EBD) is defined as the process of basing decisions about the built environment on credible research to achieve the best possible outcomes. In practice, evidence-based design often relies on less than rigorous data, supposition, and presumption. Preparation for the 2020 lighting thesis studio involved an effort to understand the principles of evidence-based design through exploration of both good and flawed examples of this type of design. With this as a foundation, students began to explore three “subthemes” in evidenced-based design: Light and Well Being, Social and Cultural Responsibility in Lighting, and Advanced Technologies and Measures. Ultimately each student’s individual work fell into one of these subcategories.

Studio work began with an emphasis on evidence-based design through experimental research using a class research project—where the entire group designed an experiment, using a tunable white lighting system in the Light and Energy Lab. In parallel, students began to develop individual experimental projects of the student’s particular interest. The group project provided a model for principles of experimental design that could be carried out in parallel in the individual student projects.

Student projects ranged from studies of the impact of light on perception, to subjective responses to lighting and the influence of light on behavior, to an evaluation of lighting metrics for color and lighting specification, to light in the context of social responsibility.

Although the coronavirus interrupted us mid-stream, the students persevered and although not entirely as planned, remarkably completed excellent work. As design students may not conduct experimental research as a part of their future work, understanding the principles of good experimental design and developing a critical eye for true evidence-based design should enable them to better address cutting edge issues in lighting design in the future and integrate this information into the lighting design process.

At Parsons School of Constructed Environments (SCE), design is understood as being in a unique position to respond to some of the most pressing issues of our time and that addressing complex problems requires expertise that spans across traditional disciplinary boundaries. From multidisciplinary coursework across the curriculum to the sharing of studio space, students in Parsons’ Masters programs in Architecture, Interior Design, and Lighting Design learn and are exposed to the issues and processes of varied design disciplines throughout their graduate study. Although the benefits and insights of interdisciplinary thinking are evidenced throughout the SCE, the student work included in the Interdisciplinary studio was completed in thesis labs structured to support cross disciplinary problem solving. With student researchers from SCE hybrid degree programs, thesis work features a shared topical framework centered on the integration of lighting design and architecture and lighting design and interior design respectively. This thesis work engages these fields against the boundaries of current practice, while simultaneously questioning the assumptions upon which these professions operate. The quality and understanding represented in this thesis research affirms the SCE belief that addressing the most complex problems of today and tomorrow demands a willingness to engage in critical thinking across disciplinary boundaries.

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