DETERMINANTS OF LIGHTING QUALITY I - STATE OF THE SCIENCE

Members of the lighting community have long speculated about the effec ts of lighting quality on human performance, comfort, and well being. This debate has become particularly heated as energy conservation has increased in importance, and building energy codes have reduced the po wer available for lighting. Past attempts to develop a metric for ligh ting quality, even in the limited case of office lighting, have largel y failed. One important reason for this failure is had science: bad re search, design, statistical analysis, and reporting. The limitations i nclude the use of abstract tasks for visibility measurements, a narrow range of behavioral outcomes, and inadequate specification of the pop ulation to which the data apply. This paper proposes that lighting qua lity research be recognized as a subset of environment-behavior resear ch and presents a behaviorally based definition of lighting quality. S elected examples from the lighting literature that fall within this de finition are reviewed. Adherence to the common practices of the behavi oral sciences promises improved knowledge of lighting effects on behav ior that researchers can bring to interdisciplinary discussions for co nsensus-based lighting design recommendations.