Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision

Introduction

I didn’t graduate from medical school but I have learned a couple of lessons. One I’ve learned is that I’m going to get older; I’m going to have vision problems; and somebody is going to make me some more rules. You have an aging orphan. That’s not real popular, because I don’t like rules.

Before I came to HOK, I worked and studied under Jim Knuckles at the Parsons School of Design. And I learned a lot of stories, and I learned a lot of “why.” The neat thing about “why” is that you can make intelligent decisions.

Lighting Design

Current Lighting “Rules” focus on Illuminance Issues; conversely, Lighting Design should focus on Luminance and Contrast Issues

Now people keep talking about lighting rules. Most of the rules – or, most of the things that we’ve caused in lighting aren’t necessarily just a lighting issue, but it’s really a contrast and it’s a luminance issue rather than [an] illuminance issue. You were talking about [lighting], even on the newspaper. I don’t need any on mine.

Comment by [Participant]: There you go.

Response by Dave Munson: It’s illuminance.

I was going to talk about some clients, but you did have an issue this morning, and I don’t think anybody has hit on it yet – lighting in vision can be cured, and be easier with time. When we first did the original lighting studies to determine how much light we needed on objects – that’s why we have 4,000 footcandles inside the body when we’re doing some surgery, and two-tenths of a footcandle when you’re scrubbing the floor in the hallway. More light, height of the iris, greater depth of field.

It all got screwed up with time. Original studies were: let’s raise the illumination models; we’ll do five assimilations per second; and we’ll have a motor action to determine accuracy. The minute we took the motor action out of it, the scores went way up. I mean – we lowered the time, the accuracy went way up. I think we had an – I can’t remember all those numbers, but they – 1973. I forgot, it was 99 – 95 percent accuracy – five assimilations per second. It was crazy. If you take time, it cures it. Just on the highway, I think if everybody drove 35 at night, we wouldn’t have any problems.

Illuminance Requirements can be reduced

Control of Glare (headlight story)

I wrote the “rules” of the new highway [design], and I said, we don’t have a lighting problem here, we have a headlight problem – because now we understand what highways are, if you block the oncoming headlight glare, you don’t need to light the highway because your headlights do it. So I convinced the state of Missouri to put in a 5-foot wall to block all the headlights. I wanted it 8 feet because then we wouldn’t see the short-skirted woman trying to change the spare tire on the other side and control the rubbernecking.

Control of Contrast (colorblind person story)

I’ve been very privileged in my career to deal with a lot of individual problems with lighting. One of my first clients calls up and said he had this beautiful house, and he loved it in the daytime, and he hated it at night, and you’ve got to come over and fix my lighting problem.

Well, we got there, he admitted to me that he was colorblind. And so when I went back to the office, I said, would you send Paula out and photograph the house in low-contrast 5-point film. It got back, I said, it’s really not a lighting problem as much as it is an interior designer problem who put in all beige furniture. [He is] walking over the furniture.

Once I saw the photographs, I said, okay, Sam, let’s add some light. And I also noticed that every time he would go and look at lighting he’d always look at his hands. And I think what he was doing is a contrast between that and this, because I know he can feel light.

So I was known for many years as the guy that saved his house. And then later, I became the guy that fixed his colorblindness. Anybody know Edwin Land? You guys all knew him, okay. Lighting designers don’t know anything about Edwin Land. He had a theory that all color was comprised of black and white and red.

The story that I remember from 1971 is, he took a stereo camera of black and white film, put a primary red subtractive filter over one lens, took a street scene, developed the film with the same primary red subtractive filter over this projecting on the wall, and he had pseudo color enough that you can actually tell what green was.

[At a] cocktail party, I’m talking to this guy who’s an optometrist. He said, is there anything that’s similar between colorblindness and lens theory of color? The guy looked at me, and he was really kind of shaken, and he said, how did you know I was reading that today? He said, I just read a guy named Warner Zentner invented the X-Chrom contact lens, primary red subtractive filter, put it on one eye, and certain people can see color.

Before I came here, I said, you know, I better look on the Internet, make sure I can still justify the story that [occurred] three or four years ago. Now I find out there are people will all kinds of contact lenses that can fix all kinds of things, all color deficiencies.

Now, I have come across a guy with a new vision problem. I’ve never heard of it before; I don’t know if there’s a cure. He’s not colorblind; he’s color dumb. When he was a child, everybody thought he was colorblind, so they never included him in decisions of color or descriptions of color. Nobody taught him that that was red. Now that he’s older, he said, yeah, I can see the difference, and you can sit and explain what colors those are, but in 20 minutes I kind of forget. So it’s early education of color.

Oh, my wife’s grandmother couldn’t play Skipbo which is a card game. And I said, well, let’s just add more light, and it just didn’t help. We fixed it with a set of pinhole glasses, because now the iris is really small. And in fact, I even find that that works for me, too.

Lighting for “Visually Reduced People” is not difficult if a Couple of Rules are followed:

The other thing is, I was – I don’t want to take too much time; I’ve got lots of stories. In doing research, [Missouri] is always a show-me state. So we always try to figure out what people can actually see. Well, I had a welding accident a couple weeks ago and it involved a vision problem in my left eye. We’re not sure whether it’s a welder’s flash or whether it’s an infection or if it’s inflammatory. Think of something; I might have to come see you.

I have developed a pair of glasses that are very similar to what my vision was in this eye a week ago. And here’s the thing. Lighting for visually reduced people is not difficult if you follow a couple of rules. Here’s the first rule. You have to remember that the eye is attracted by the brightest object in a room. It also means the brightest object is also distracted or the eye is distracted by the brightest object in the room.

When you do vision studies and we’re doing tests, the task wants to be the brightest object in your field of view. The surface around it should be slightly darker. Putting a white piece of paper on a black blotter is kind of like taking a picture of a white guy against a black wall.

Your candle will overcompensate for one of the fields. The other thing is, the surrounding fields should be slightly darker so you can concentrate on this field.

If you remember those rules, then it gets easier. I think we might have to go back to the future to solve some of these problems. With technology, the light sources have gotten smaller.

[Rule 1: The eye is attracted/distracted by the brightest object in a room

Rule 2: The “task” should be the brightest object in your field of view

Rule 2a: The surface around [the task] should be slightly darker

Rule 2b: The surrounding fields should be slightly darker so you can concentrate on this field] 

Lamps and Fixtures

In the ‘50s, we had something called a comfort lamp. You ever seen one? T16, T20 diameter fluorescent tube, it was nice and big, it wasn’t glary. When we went from T12 lamps – in lighting, everything is measured in one-eighths of an inch – T12 is an inch-and-a-half in diameter. T8 is one inch in diameter. When we went from T12 to T8, lighting got very glary in offices when people would look up [into the] parabolics.

The parabolics in very early lighting were nice and deep, shielded all the lamps. In fact, I remember Jim Knuckles talking about the first time they did recessed down lights in the ceiling, and the lights were made exactly the right color so they were the same color as the ceiling. They had to put table lamps in some of the rooms because it was so disorienting, nobody knew where the light was coming from [important behavioral issue].

MR16s, these little glary things [i.e., halogen light bulbs] here [pointing to the track-lighting in the conference room] made it very difficult to see. And I’m afraid that the newest technology is going to become our worst nightmare, and that’s the LED [light emitting diode bulbs].

Summary

The important thing is that you have to know why things happen. And if you understand why, I mean, I’ve seen so many books that said how to do it. But if you know why, then the how is easy.