Posts
Ken and I recently decided it was time to jump into the Social Media world with both feet. With help from a fabulous social media guru (TC Coleman of Upward Action), we opened and populated accounts on FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, and it seemed that we were saturating the “airwaves,” albeit slowly and deliberately. But with all that, we still felt that we had no “voice,” no way to actually talk in a leisurely and thoughtful way about lighting, the built environment industry, or other topics that might be of interest to us and our colleagues, friends and clients.
So, I welcome you to the very first of IA’s blog posts.
Where do I begin? As with most things, it’s possible to overthink this, so I’m going to pick up right here in the middle, with some words about an article I saw recently in the Washington Post.
“In light-bulb business, lumens try to power past watts” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/30/AR2011013004537.html?sid=ST2011013100409) was a story about the attempt to reframe the conversation about lighting, particularly for a lay audience, by referring to lumens (brightness) instead of watts (power) when categorizing a lamp (light bulb). And I hope I’ve made my point. The article made me realize the degree to which our industry jargon (and that’s any industry, not just lighting) is so natural to us that we don’t realize how completely foreign it is to outsiders. (The Post even made fun of the lighting industry’s use of the word “lamp.” Harumph.)
But it makes so much sense! How can we still speak in watts, when that information is irrelevant to the amount of light emitted by a source? So, we need to forget the metric debacle, and find a successful way to get people to think in lumens instead of watts.
According to the article, the federal government has launched LUMEN (Lighting Understanding for a More Efficient Nation) to lead us into the future, but the group has yet to be funded, and the only information about it on line is the document outlining its structure. I’m anxiously awaiting more news about LUMEN, and hope that the lighting design industry puts its full support behind this effort.
Faith
