Sustainable Lighting Design – Appropriate metrics for built environment education?

Daylighting metrics are gaining increasing importance within architectural design. As global environmental energy saving targets demand verification for accreditation of sustainable, “well building” lighting design proposals architectural practitioners engage with these metrics within the process of designing and procuring a building. Daylighting may now only assume a small part of an overall sustainability agenda due to the reducing impact of artificial lighting. However, the enhancement of a space with good, controlled daylighting has a wide-ranging positive impact. Through significant reduction of artificial lighting hours to promoting well-being for the building occupants using exterior views and light as circadian stimulus (Baker and Steemers, 2002), (Boyce, 2010), (Burnett, 2015), (Rea and Figueiro, 2016), daylight evaluation is a powerful tool for designers creating and modifying spatial environments. This paper identifies that currently architects in general practice engage very little with these daylight evaluation tools. However, the substantial evidence of researchers highlighted above confirms the benefits of daylighting on building occupants and verifies daylighting metrics should therefore be considered within the process of general architectural design. This paper seeks to propose a framework to encourage daylight evaluation as part of contemporary general architectural practice
through trial studies with participants in architectural design education.