INDOOR LIGHTING:

The European Standard EN 12646-1 part 1 “Lighting of  indoor work places” published in 2002 specifically introduces a new term and criterion: "lighting of the task area". This means that lighting designers more than ever can create interesting and stimulating visual working environments. The challenge however is  to make the installations energy friendly and cost effective. As with other applications the combination of the use of the right lighting products with the use of the right specification for the installation is determining.
Intelligent lighting with a right balance between automatic and user control, enable daylight linking and occupancy dependent control to minimize energy consumption.

A future new version of the European Standard should also take into account non-visual effects of lighting to arrive at true healthy lighting installations. Of course with the right expertise we can start already today designing intelligent healthy dynamic lighting installations.

One of the important changes in the 2002 Standard is the introduction of a new “unified glare rating” system (UGR). In contrast to earlier glare restriction systems used in many European countries this system  makes selection of  luminaires based on manufacturers data more difficult. It is for this purpose that a team of specialists under the leadership of van Bommel developed a system for luminaire photometrics that also permits easy selection of luminaires based on the UGR system.

The figure shows an example of  a UGR diagram for a certain office lighting luminaire.