Human-Building Collaboration: Toward Lighting Enabled Collaborative System Design

The profession of lighting design is evolving given that contemporary lighting systems increasingly rely on cutting-edge computational technologies, sensors, and IOT systems. This trend requires that designers incorporate ideas of automation, dynamic controls, and user-system interaction into their design logic. However, real-time lighting simulations are constrained by inherent limitations arising from the reductive assumptions inevitably introduced in simulated lighting environments. This raises the question of how designers can account for the discrepancies between simulated and real lighting environments, and how collaboration between humans and autonomous lighting systems can bridge this gap. To address this question, a protocol for designing collaborative interactions between humans and systems is proposed. This protocol builds on the Human-Lighting System Interaction Framework (Varsami et al., 2022) and demonstrates how the integration of human and system intelligence fine-tunes lighting qualities in a given space. The paper shows how interactive lighting systems can locally customize lighting based on user preferences in real-time and how global lighting configurations can be adjusted over time. Specifically, the paper demonstrates: a) Human-system collaboration assumptions and goals as well as how the protocol can be integrated into digitally programmable lighting systems. b) Implementations of collaboration that reveal how system autonomy, performance, and user experience are improved over short and long-term timeframes. c) How lighting design can be enhanced qualitatively, beyond what simulation-driven design optimization methodologies can afford. The associated affordances and limitations are discussed with respect to existing lighting simulation design frameworks.