 Here all a very warm welcome to the Havels Present Spotlight series organized by Real Diplas Masterclass. Spotlight is a monthly webinar series which explores the dynamics of lighting, featuring nationally and internationally acclaimed lighting consultants, designers and experts who share their knowledge and expertise on the future trends in the world of lighting. I'm Sapna Srivastava, Editorial Diplas Magazine and let's begin with a brief introduction of Real Diplas. Can we have the A.B.P. Success doesn't just happen, it happens by design. By pushing the boundaries, by raising the bar, it's days of creating a vision and nights of bringing it to life. Knowing that pictures are worth a thousand words and every word makes a difference. It's doing the research, trusting your instinct and finishing what you started. For the past 17 years, Real Diplas has been turning obstacles into opportunities, keeping the industry informed on the latest developments, innovating to inspire debate and discussion, bringing forth the perspectives of industry leaders, achievement, keeping the industry connected. This is what we are built on. This is what we are building. Real Diplas and we lead the way. This was a brief snippet of Real Diplas products and to know more about us to get in touch with Mr. Rikthikeya, publisher and business head of Real Diplas. And now moving on to the program of the day, I welcome Mr. Partha Karmakar, Business Head for Professional Lighting at Havas Group. Let me give a brief introduction on Mr. Karmakar. He's a passionate lighting professional with overall experience of more than two decades in lighting industry and hands-on experience on lighting design, specification sales, marketing, product management and managing business verticals. He's a strong techno-commercial professional and through the career he has been involved in some of the very prestigious installations across the country and abroad. Mr. Karmakar, a very warm welcome to you and we have you on the screen. Thanks Mr. Karmakar for joining us and if you can just share very crisp views on what this spotlight series is all about and the episode today that we are going to have. Yeah, very warm welcome to everybody and very good afternoon to everyone, Sapna and certainly Real Diplas. So this is a very interesting moment for us to have this spotlight series. Spotlight is a very important initiative which has been taken by Havas. Let me just tell you why spotlight because before we get and understand a little bit about what is spotlight, it's important that why in lighting this is required because when I look at light, light is life because without light there is no life. It is so important like air and water and over the years we have been using light just like an instrument which is throwing some light but I would relate this very much similar to maybe a handset device. It has evolved from just talking to a huge gamut of services beyond just talking. So similarly, I think light also the equipments which are used for providing light have also greatly evolved in the last so many years and it is no more just a light. So it is evolved in multiple dimensions and extended to multiple areas of creating well-being as well as light can actually improve the health of people was something which was very far information. So many people were not aware that it is possible. Spotlight is a platform where we are happy to bring in experts of this industry who have a larger experience and exposure on hands-on lighting projects who can bring in how the overall industry has evolved. They can bring in the knowledge, the learning which we all can get benefited. So it is primarily just a learning platform where we are getting the expectations of the market more visible and available for us from point of view of our internal team whether these are product development people or the marketing or the touch points in the marketplace or the supporters and customers. So it is a very vast global platform which actually gives us the chance to learn from experts. So that is why I say that from Hevels this is a very strong initiative which will help us be in the right position in the marketplace of imparting right information and right education. Thanks Mr. Karamaka for setting the tone of the day and as you rightly said lighting has come into focus especially in the last one year when we have been restricted to indoors and human centricity and wellness are the topical subjects that everyone is talking about. So yes as you rightly said who best then to have an expert to talk about it. So now let us bring on stage the star of the day who is a born artist and has a special talent in understanding and analyzing building architecture. So let me introduce our eminent speaker of the day Mr Praveen Thambi creative director of the ministry of light. Let me also give a brief introduction of our speaker. Mr Praveen Thambi started his career as a lighting designer in the year 2000 and then went on to establish his own lighting design and uncertainty firm called the ministry of light with offices in Hong Kong, Mumbai and Dubai. It is today one of the largest architectural lighting designing firms in Asia Pacific. Praveen Thambi is a member of the Indian Society of Lighting Engineers and is one of the few lighting consultants worldwide who specializes in innovative and sustainable office lighting techniques by blending the ASHRAE standards, C-I-B-S-E-L-G7 guidelines and IGBC LEED standards. Over the years he has conceptualized and designed the lighting for several world renowned monuments and heritage structures and has won the IESNA Illumination Design Award in 2004 and Young Design Entrepreneur of the Year 2010 Award by the British Council. So Mr Praveen Thambi a very warm welcome to you and thanks for joining us here today. I hand it over to you now. Thank you for that introduction and yeah good evening. I mean it's good afternoon everyone. We have a very interesting and one of my favorite topics which is how we can kind of blend wellness and sustainability together in an office environment. So let me start with the presentation one second. Sorry just am I audible and is my screen visible? Yes. All right. Okay so let's directly dwell into today's topic. We are looking at how we are looking at aligning wellness and sustainability for smart buildings. Now to me we already have as far as wellness is related we have something called as the well standards from the Well Building Institute and as far as sustainability is concerned we have the lead standard which comes in from the U.S. Green Building Council originally and now we have various versions of that in different countries in different green label formats. But before I get into that I would like to run you through a little bit of a history on the evolution of office lighting and throughout the decades since 1960s and 70s to the 90s and then in the 2000s and 2010 how we had went of early these things started changing. So we all know that till 90s when we had no PC screens in office spaces it was a office full of papers. So predominantly the working plane was a tabletop and that is where the CPC in the earlier days had defined lux levels defined on the application and the kind of activity that goes on and they defined various lux levels on tabletop. So these were fixed uniform illuminance levels on work planes for different types of activities and areas. Now this slowly started changing to variable dynamic zone lighting that is derived from human needs well-being the task and the perception of space. It originally started with the advent of Windows 3 and Windows 95. So predominantly the 90s is when things started changing where we left from doing our tasks on the horizontal plane to the vertical plane when you had video display units or screens. So immediately when Windows 95 became very popular and people started using desktops in office spaces CPC immediately changed the basic lighting guidelines for work spaces and they said yes of course they looked at horizontal plane illumination they did not really look at vertical plane illumination. They said yes for CAD workstation kind of spaces you need at least 500 lux. What was interesting was what they originally noticed was with the conventional lighting we had the issue of reflected glare or reflections of the luminaire coming onto the screens. So that is where they introduced three categories of mirror optic systems which would cut down the glare and cut down the reflections on the screen. So we had category 1, category 2 and category 3 kind of luminaires and if you have worked on office projects in the 2000s a CAT2 system was the most popular kind of system where you would limit the luminance from the luminaire beyond 65 degrees at 200 candles for meter square which would basically curtail the reflections of the luminaires on the screen. Now with this of course it did work effectively in terms of achieving no reflections on the screen but if you look at the screen you already noticed that your ceiling tends to be relatively dark and your vertical illumination is dark. So what actually happened was they did not realize that when the task changes from the horizontal plane to the vertical plane and when you had larger floor plates coming up with improved building construction, you had larger floor plates which meant that your visual environment was predominantly the ceiling and the vertical planes which is the wall. So I mean this is an example of a project we did in 2001. So one of my first projects for JP Morgan where we use category 2 kind of mirror optics we we got extremely good what you call horizontal plane illuminance but if you look at the space the space looks very dull and gloomy you know because the ceiling is not well lit up and your verticals are not very well lit up. So this resulted in the space looking very dull and gloomy which resulted in a lot of attrition in IT spaces in spaces where people so people who are not very happy going to offices and this was a quick realization which happened over a period of time and there were also issues that when people started using PC screens for 12 to 14 hours continuously and they were looking at the screen with a predominantly dark background. They had a lot of stress on the ciliary muscles and people started having watering of the eyes and a lot of visual issues with the eyes were happening and that's when Sipsy immediately in 2003 recommended that we need to kind of change this and look at how we can improve the well-being of the people who are working inside the space. So with the traditional fixed illuminance system which was there in 1996 the the primary issue like I said was that the office was looking dull and gloomy category 2 delta distribution left the ceiling dark only horizontal plane illuminances were defined so even though the task actually changed from the horizontal table top to vertical and became a paperless office we were still defining only horizontal plane illuminances and uniformities. So the vertical plane illuminances and the ceiling illuminances which is important for prolonged working on video display units were not defined. So the contrast ratio of the 3 is to 1 between the task and the surrounding because your screen already is a bright screen. Now if you look at a bright screen against a dark background then your ciliary muscles are very stressed. So to avoid that you need to have a 3 is to 1 contrast between the task and the surrounding so that is where the vertical illuminance was coming to picture and also the other aspect which was being so earlier it was task based and application based. It was never based on the age group of people and the preferences of the people occupying the space. So for example a 20 year old would require much lesser luxe levels than a 60 year old. A 6 year old actually requires 15 times more luxe levels to the same task as compared to a 20 year old. So this was not defined in the earlier standards because it was based on a basic task based system. So that is when the new directions came up in 2005 from CIPC which was called the LG7 standards which then basically divided the office space. I mean office also evolved into a club office environment where you had the concentration areas which were the workstations and the areas of like the cabins and then you had the communication spaces like the meeting rooms and all of those which required a different kind of lighting level. Now depending on the age group of people they defined that you cannot fix 300 or 400 luxe. It has to be variable anywhere between 300 to 1000 luxe depending on the age group of the people who are occupying the space. It also defined two important parameters. One is the ceiling illuminance which should be at least 150 luxe and the walls which should be at least 200 luxe. Now this we are talking 2005 it's almost 15 16 years back. Even today if you look at most offices across the globe people still talk about horizontal plane illuminance. They never talk about vertical plane and ceiling illuminance. Any office which is designed by a standard MEP consultant all they look at is okay am I getting 350 luxe on the tabletop am I getting a uniformity of 60 or 70 percent and that's the whole debate. They never talk about luminance and how the visual environment is looking and so these were the new directions which came in. It was not a standard in 2005 yet but then immediately there were a couple of lighting consultants who started looking at how we can achieve this. At this point I would also like to say that one of the reasons why this did not become popular is because most of the large multinational lighting companies at that point of time had heavily invested in mirror optics and this was a complete shift because this kind of took away mirror optics out of the picture and you had to have ceiling illuminance which means you were widening the overall this thing. So people did not really promote this concept because they had heavily invested in mirror optics and I would blame some of the large lighting companies which really did not put this to practice immediately. But if I look at it this is typically how I would want to have an office space look like as per the new standards which basically means that I have a completely lit ceiling and I have some kind of a task lighting which kind of every individual can adjust to their requirements in terms of intensity as well as the temperature. You have some vertical illuminance where we light up the drapes or the walls so you have good vertical illuminance. So overall if you compare this to the earlier picture which I showed the visual environment is really bright. This is nothing like it's as good as sitting under the sky and creating that kind of an effect and but one of the disadvantages with this was the fact that the lighting load definitely goes higher because when you do something like this you are looking at a lighting power density of about 1 to 1.2 watts a square feet and the 2006-7 is when the lead standards came into picture where they started talking about carbon footprint and all companies started becoming more and more aware about energy efficiency. So achieving something like this at let us say 0.8 or 0.6 watts a square feet becomes very difficult and that is where the challenge always remains. And these were some of the other experiments which a lot of lighting companies came up with where we moved away from the mirror optics, came up with the concept of a direct indirect kind of light which would give a more diffused lighting that's not cut off the glare at 65 degrees but still doesn't create harsh reflections on the screen and then you would also have a set of wall washers which would light up the wall separately. But effectively what happens is you're still consuming a lot of power, you're not able to get a sustainable design with low carbon footprint with this kind of system. These were some of the other innovations which came up with some of the European companies where you had these micro prismatic optics downward and you had an upward component and for some reason because these luminaires were very small at that time, I mean this is all times when there were no LEDs. So they used this compact fluorescent lamp called the PLL which are extremely high lumens packed into it and this also resulted in some kind of a patch luminance. So even though you are having indirect lighting, you're not getting a uniform smooth glow in the ceiling, you're getting these bright patch luminances which are more than 10,000 cantalus per meter square and this effectively was creating certain amount of reflections on the screen. So it's also not the ideal scenario. Then came some of the floor standing up and down lighters where again if you use some kind of an optics to kind of spread out the light, you had a well balanced lighting which was good but if you didn't have that and you had direct light throwing onto the ceiling then you had these bright patches which created imbalance lighting. And then in 2007 end is when we really got a big break in terms of how we can achieve LG7 standard lighting with one luminaire effectively and this was a new innovation from Sylvania Concorde which strangely was also bought over by Havels at one point of time and this was one of the first luminaires which actually became semi-resist and you had some kind of an optics which would throw light into the ceiling. So you still had a flushed luminaire which could throw light into the ceiling and effectively get more ceiling illuminance and good vertical illuminance. We did one of the first projects immediately in 2008 with these luminaires which were semi-resist. So the Volkswagen headquarters at that point of time and this was one of the first projects where we executed this in India and if you see this just with these luminaires you have a fairly good glow in the ceiling and the overall space looks much brighter and it's a more conducive visual environment for work. By 2008 end then LEED started picking up green building standards were becoming more and more popular and one of the key aspects in green building especially if you are looking for a platinum rating which most people were trying to at that point of time was the fact that they introduced something called as a personal task light. Most people did not understand what a task light was so usually what they ended up doing was put up a table lamp which everybody can adjust and did the general lighting but overall with this green buildings in if you see most of the offices which were designed during 2008 to 2010 ended up being extremely dark because they were primarily focusing on a task light which was like a table lamp which really didn't do much of a job and the overall space was looking very dull and gloomy so the whole LG 7 guideline got defeated there. We came up with a interesting solution which was an intelligent task light which was a a major source not not just a table lamp so it was something which gets integrated on to the workstation. It was a 20 watt T5 tube at that point of time with the built-in sensor where you could individually adjust the lighting and this was actually a prototype of what we designed. It also has an upward component which throws light onto the ceiling so what we looked at was how we can interspace an LG 7 semi-recess luminaire with the task light in between so the combination of this so because this wouldn't throw all the way up there so we were able to space these out very well reduce the number of lights in the ceiling by almost 40% and introduce these task lights where we were able to achieve a LPD of 0.65. We're looking at this with T5 mind you it's not even LEDs we're talking about T5s where we were able to achieve 0.6 watts per square feet at that point of time and this was one of the first prototypes we designed for the Rajesh corporate office in Mumbai was a prototype small office but that's how it turned out so you had the upward component of the task light which would throw light into the ceiling and kind of cover up the patches which were being created with these so the blend of the two was kind of a success it kind of gave the perfect visual ambience to the whole space you also got this good vertical illuminance on the partitions which were coming behind the screen so overall you were able to achieve LG 7 standard and you were also able to achieve the lead guidelines in terms of LPD then with that blend of LEDs you had a whole new gamut of luminance which came in where you had the suspended up down lighters again one of the reasons why these became popular is well you know during the 2008 onward there were a lot of startups who were working from cafes so effectively cafes became workstations and that is where the whole concept of co-working spaces came in and they all came from a background of a cafe so offices then started looking like cafes and that's what is happening even today where offices are looking like cafes and cafes are primarily designed by retail designers and not office designers and a lot of these retail luminance started coming into office spaces which is not really good because the UGR rating of these are definitely more than 21-24 and for office spaces you are looking at UGR less than 19 and we even designed spaces with UGR less than 16. Now if you look at something like this where you have a really small aperture and these luminaires usually come with at least 28 to 30 watts per meter and when you punch so much of flux into the space and you have a really slim opal diffuser your luminance here again goes high so you still have more than if you take a luminance done and measure here you definitely get more than 1000 lumens for 1000 candles per meter square which is not good again if you had these kind of suspended up and down again you had these patches happening in the ceiling not not the best of solutions again so if you're looking at slot lights you should at least look at 150 mm like how the texon luminaires were designed the texon usually had originally for the workspaces a 100 mm slot where you could fit in a diffuser and a luminaire which fairly you can control the luminance less than 300 to 400 candles per meter square and this of course is a good option which is a refractor optics which kind of refracts the light into the ceiling and it also throws fairly good gives fairly good vertical illuminance sleek luminaire which originally was restricted to only cabins and meeting room but today with technology improvement and with LEDs you have you can have one source which basically throws light into the ceiling refracts upward as well as refracts downward so because of the refraction even with 100 150 mm you are able to keep restrict the luminances and control the glare you can still achieve UGR less than 16 with these kind of solutions and gives a fairly uniform glow in the ceiling with the uniformity more than 50% and you can create that sky effect this is another issue which like I mentioned earlier with a lot of these cafe kind of concepts coming in people started doing away with a false ceiling and doing open ceilings initially it started with low ceiling heights and how you can improve the ceiling height but then what happened was when you have these really dark ceilings the overall visual annoyance and you can see this compared to most of the other spaces your visual annoyance is really dark and forget looking at a pc screen against this background even these luminaires which are extremely bright against this dark background is really annoying I mean I have worked in a lot of these kind of space and it you really cannot sit there and work more than two three hours comfortably and this is one of the biggest issues and challenges in the industry today we have spoken with a lot of architects and interior designers who design these kind of spaces and try to tell them that at least if you're doing these kind of spaces you should have something like a floating ceiling right above the workstations which can be predominantly preferably white so that you can get some amount of reflective light back and your space looks much more brighter so that's kind of an evolution of how we have come to what we are today now today like I said we have the version 4 of the lead standards which predominantly talks about sustainability and how we can reduce the lighting load and how you can introduce lighting controls to improve the overall carbon footprint and stuff like that so when we look at the latest lead standards it predominantly says that the overall lighting power density has to be less than 0.7 watts per square feet and we should be able to achieve a lpd of less than 0.6 watts per square feet in open workstation area provide lighting controls for at least 90 percent of individual spaces for shared spaces provide group controls meet average surface reflectance values of the ceiling of at least 85 percent wall of 60 percent and floors of 25 percent so this one aspect itself is is like a boon to most most most lighting consultants because it says that you have to have a ceiling reflectance of at least 85 percent and if you have a dark ceiling that's definitely not possible the walls have to have at least 60 percent and the floors at least 25 percent so you're looking at a fairly blood fairly bright light surfaces install daylight sensors for at least 25 percent of the connected lighting loan in peripheral areas and what is more important is the fact that finally they have come come to some amount of the visual aspects of lighting which is brought into the lead guidelines where it says that the ceiling illuminance has to be at least 30 percent of the work plane illuminance and the vertical illuminance has to be at least 50 percent of the work plane illuminance something which NBC has now put forward it was only I think in 2011 and 2012 that NBC came up with these standards and now it's part of the lead standard so what it basically means is if you have about 400 lbs on the table top you need to have at least 150 lbs of that in the ceiling I don't know how even today whether lead consultants are even looking at these aspects but this is something which is very important now for lead certification so that's pretty much about the sustainability aspect we all know about that let us now look at the well standards well now has got a version two which predominantly talks about the well being of people inside the office space so well not only looks at the visual aspects it also looks at the physiological aspects of light and how daylight is controlled in the space and everything so well predominantly touches upon visual acuity circadian lighting electric light glare control solar glare control low glare workstation design color quality surface design automated shading and dimming controls right to light for every occupant daylight exposure and daylight satisfaction so these are all covered under well standards if you're designing a lead plus well standard or a certified project then pretty much all of this is covered we'll just look at in detail what each of these means visual acuity is purely about photopic illumination about what we already discussed in terms of the 60 standards it says that you have prior horizontal illuminance of at least 350 lbs a ceiling illuminance of at least 30% on the work plane similar to what has come from the lead standards as well plus it also talks about task lighting where it says you have to have task lighting which provides at least 300 to 600 lbs which if your ambient lighting in the workstation area is less than 300 lbs then we look at one of the most talked about aspects which is circadian lighting so there's a big confusion between human centric lighting and circadian lighting so circadian lighting is one of the aspects of human centric lighting when we talk about human centric lighting it is all of these put together all of these put together is what we call as human centric lighting where human person it's about lighting ergonomics of the office space where the human being is the key criteria based on which the whole space is designed so of course circadian is one of the aspects of it we all know that as the day progresses the natural light imaged by the sunlight both in terms of color temperature angle and intensity varies so if you see that's how the color color temperature of the sun and intensity varies from morning to evening and we are all diurnal people we are all supposed to wake up when the sun comes up and go to sleep when the sun goes down and this is because we have something called as a biological clock or the supracismatic nucleus which basically keeps track of the sunlight so in a natural environment when we didn't have buildings we were easily able to keep track of the sunlight and how the progression of the the color temperature happens from morning to evening but when we are in an office space what happens is you are restricted to let's say a fixed 3000 Kelvin or 4000 Kelvin or 6000 Kelvin so effectively your body clock is not able to keep track of the sunlight even though you have glazing in some areas we have seen that almost 60 percent of the office space with large office plates do not have ample amount of sunlight coming in and if there is a good amount of sunlight coming in as well because of the glare most people bring the drips down and so it's you're not really experiencing the sunlight that's happening outside so what exactly is circadian lighting it is circadian lighting is a concept that electric tunable white led lighting can be used to support long-term human health of the occupants and improve their productivity by simulating the natural daylight outside within the office space by intensity tuning color tuning and stimulus tuning there are several symbologic circadian geocentric lighting management system softwares available some are clinically proven some just follow a natural daylight pattern but all of these is for the well-being of people and it also works well when you are also doing night shift so uh india is one of the uh places where this started becoming more popular than the west because the fact that most of the call centers of most of the american companies were in india and that's where people were working in night shifts with the completely against nature that's why circadian lighting is kind of becoming more and more popular in india as compared to europe and the us just to give a brief uh detail about circadian lighting this is more of a fifth standard biology where we know about rods and cones these are the rods these are the cones which are responsible for seeing things we know these rods and cones are connected to the ganglion cells which in turn connects to the optical track to the visual cortex and that's how you see things it was only in 2003 by dr brainard who discovered that there were certain ganglion cells in the retina which were not connected to rods and cones which actually had a direct path which connected to the supracus winning nucleus or what we call as the biological clock what you see the red is the optical track and what you see in purple here is the non non-image forming track the light entering your eyes through uh both helps in seeing things and it also helps in the overall well-being of your body what does you just understand what the biological clock is all about the supracus minic clock basically uh controls your ultradian rhythm which happens every minute and second it happened it controls your circadian rhythm which is your daily rhythm circular lunarism and circular annual rhythms and this is typically how uh you know from morning to evening ideally if you are waking up at 6 a.m when the sun rises this is ideally how your system is supposed to work so if you wake up at 6 a.m by 6 45 there is a rise in blood pressure about one and a half hours after you wake up your melatonin secretion which is responsible for sleep kind of stops production you have highest testosterone level at about nine which is usually three hours from when you wake up your high alertness at 10 a.m that's why you know you do most of your toughest tasks when you wake up in the morning and at 10 to 11 is when you do most of those activities best coordination is around uh 4 30 p.m fast reaction time is at 3 30 p.m uh 4 to 5 p.m is when they say uh it's the best time for doing workouts because you burn maximum the same because you have great cardiovascular and muscle strength at that time again as the sun sets the blood pressure starts rising again your body temperature goes high around 7 p.m and by 9 p.m you start secreting more melatonin then you go to sleep and at 4 a.m is when you have the highest amount of melatonin secretion and that's when you have uh deep sleep and that is also when you have maximum number of accidents happening so that's your basic circadian rhythm why does why is it important because your mood performance alertness body temperature hormone production of the pineal gland which is the melatonin serotonin hormone production of the adrenal cortex the structure of the EEG urine production and its composition uh sleep wake pattern basically all of your body processes are controlled by the circadian rhythm which is controlled by the light and bring your eyes and this is typically how the color temperature of the sun varies from morning to evening of course it goes as high as 16-17 000 Kelvin but yeah this is typically how in various parts of the world it is different as well I mean uh even so that is why uh what we usually do is we take the main average of what happens in a space in a city and that's what you're adapted to so every individual has a different circadian cycle depending on the sunlight in where they're born and bought up what are the benefits of human circadian lighting in office spaces well as far as whatever studies they've done on a few projects and some studies that have happened internationally we know that there is increased alertness in the morning productivity and concentration improvements improved mode reduced hyperactivity reduction in errors and accidents faster cognitive processing reduces post lunch lethargy reduced number of uh coffee and loot breaks improved sleep at night so overall it is better for the staff as well as the employees uh employers and with night shift things get much better because you do not have any desynchronization of the biological club so a person going into night shift can work as efficiently as a person working in the day shift because we're kind of shifting their clock by 12 hours and that's how you're able to work efficiently uh in the nighttime so uh it also increased alertness throughout the night shift productivity and concentration improvements uh improved mode reduced hyperactivity reduced errors and accidents faster cognitive processing less accidents while driving back home this is also one of the big big issues with people working in call centers like they spend the whole night there with sudden listening and they are really sleepy by the time they are going back home and this ends up in a lot of accidents so when you have a circadian software which kind of uh mimics the sunlight we also give something called as a uh safe home boost which kind of uh keep them keeps them active till they reach home and then after that they get really good sleep when they are back home uh circadian lighting also is kind of quantified in terms of what we call as melanopic glass uh basically so there is a relation between how much of the photopic glass is equivalent to melanopic glass and surprisingly it is not same for each kind of light source so for every light source uh artificial light source except uh even though incandescent light source has got a 100% color rendering index as we know but the melanopic ratio of uh incandescent lamp uh is is much lower it's only 0.54 of what the others are and leds is even lower at 2700 kelvin so uh if you look at this uh a 4000 kelvin led has maximum effect on the melanopic glass so you have about 76 percent uh so which means that if you have designed the office space for 350 lux with 4000 kelvin led you are approximately getting about 250 melanopic lux which will keep your circadian system active i'm not saying that this will help in kind of uh synchronizing with the daylight but at least it it has an impact in terms of keeping your melatonin suppressed and getting your activity level better then we look at uh lighting layer control where we already have a unified layer rating system now so uh we are looking at a ugls n6 c n olex n19 in in an office space uh room surface design this is also very important where we already discussed that your ceiling reflectance has to be at least 80% wall reflectance has to be at least 70% and furniture system should be at least 50% so it's also uh defining in terms of watercolor combinations to be used inside the office space so that the overall lighting is well balanced uh yes and it does talk about at least 30% of the ceiling elements to be on the work plane and at least 50% of it on the uh sorry on from the walls this is one of the other aspects where we look at how we can control uh the glare coming in from the sunlight and maximum utilization of sunlight can happen in an office space we all know most of the large uh offices today most of them are glazed buildings but 90% of the times when in the morning when the when the sun is at the horizon and there's a lot of glare people pull down the drapes and uh they never pull it back so throughout the day the drapes are down because they they experience that glare in the morning and even though in the afternoon when the sun goes up uh there is no glare and you have good amount of quality daylight coming in that the drapes are still drawn down so that is where you have to have either some kind of an external mechanism which cuts down the glare and maximizes the amount of uh daylight that is coming in or you should have motorized blinds which are connected to a advanced lighting management system which will uh check the luminances from the sun's rays and accordingly adjust the drapes it is not that you you adjust the drapes based on uh a timer you basically have luminance sensors which are fixed onto the glass which will uh detect uh uh direct rays from the sunlight as well as reflected rays from the sun so if you have for example a glazed building near to you and the sun is kind of reflecting on that glass incoming back and creating a past luminance a high luminance into the space then the uh blinds automatically self adjust so this is also uh being described as one of the standards in the well standards and then of course uh low glare workstation design which means you avoid using high gloss material which will kind of create reflected light onto the I mean reflected reflected glare so we are supposed to have matte finishes and preferably light colored surfaces when it comes to uh the furniture selection color rendering of course uh it says that you have to have uh a color rendering more than 80 percent but especially with leds we have seen that the the the r9 condensate is usually low and that is where it says that the color rendering index of r9 has to be at least 50 percent in the light source that you're using in the office space then of course the personalized uh uh lighting where every individual or the right to light for every every individual in the office space where each individual should be able to adjust the lighting to their requirements these are some of the various options of how you can have the personal task light this was originally what uh we showed as one of the designs where we've used it extensively on a lot of uh uh green building these are some of the newer concepts which come up in terms of how you can do personalized task lighting very both now with the tunable system you can also adjust the color temperature as well as intensity and the lux level depending on each individual's requirement also reduces the number of lights in the ceiling if you notice in each of these cases uh extremely fast-paced ceiling elements you get a very clean ceiling you don't have to go it's conventional two by tools you can do you know various kinds of uh because you're looking at only about 200 lux coming in from the ceiling and the rest is all coming from the task light so that's predominantly how we look at blending uh sustainability with uh uh well-being one of the projects we did in 2016 was the northern trust facility in Pune which was one of the uh most advanced uh tunable wide circadian lighting system which also took care of well standard from a lighting perspective and also it was a lead gold uh very recently got to read the lead gold rating for this project and if you see what's interesting is inside spaces you can vary the color temperature depending on the uh the the sunlight outside so all of these spaces depending on how the color temperature of the sun in Pune changes the lighting also changes on a circadian software what we were uh a little worried about was how you will be working inside the office space with the varying color temperature so if you have like a 2500 Kelvin on the table top it's it's not very conducive if you if you notice daylight outside the way it is the sky is what really changes the color if you look outside you're usually looking at about uh 4500 to 5500 to 6000 Kelvin that's what is the variance in the color temperature inside so the task area should really not be changing its color what should be changing is the overall ambience so we looked at a dual optics luminaire here because this was again one of the projects where the client wanted something recessed in the ceiling they didn't want a suspended kind of luminaire so we looked at a dual optics where you had these diffusers which were tunable they changed their color temperature from morning through evening and you had a laser blade optics in the middle which would kind of throw light onto the table top which is 6 to 4000 Kelvin so your functional lighting varies only between 4000 to 5500 and the overall ambience kind of changes uh in terms of the overall space gives a gives a very natural feel natural sunlight feel in the office space again in closed cabins we have used spread fabric feeling with tunable white LEDs and also in different sections and so these are again divided into different zones horizontally so that you can utilize the space for various application areas like the video conferencing and for a general presentation and stuff like that this is their general training center again we created the same so all areas which did not have any kind of daylight coming in we kind of created the sky effect and the tunable system like i said earlier also where in the collab spaces and breakout spaces where again uh the designers wanted to go with open cell ceiling i mean open ceiling concept but then we recommended that instead of going for a dark ceiling we go with a light white ceiling which makes the space looks much more brighter and doesn't look dull and gloomy so that that's the other way of how we look at it if you have an open ceiling concept as well and of course they were all connected to a motorized line which uh through the lighting management system which would basically adjust the drapes based on the luminance is coming in from the sunlight so this overall system works fantastic and even if you look at all of these kind of luminance the central optics is kind of fixed at 4000 k and the wing kind of changes color so the overall indirect lighting changes its color temperature so that's pretty much how it was yes this was one of the projects where it was 100% uh compliant to well lighting standards of course they did not look at most of the other aspects of well but from a lighting perspective it was 100% compliant truly human centric because we took care of all of the other aspects of the cc7 lg7 standards uh as well as the well standards in terms of this thing we had an advanced lighting management system which not only uh kind of uh does uh dim up and down of lights based on uh movement and daylight but it also collect data in terms of heat map and uh kind of uh has a option for connectivity to an iot system via backnet so that you can have uh an exact idea of how many people are occupying the space a lot of other data security data and a lot of the other can be kind of propagated from this basic lighting management system which was again a value based system um the conference room could equip with uh zone circadian lighting which can also do tunable white and the way we design the tunable white system is also such that we did we did a pilot project for one of the global companies is a global project where we look at look at how uh the skin tone of every individual can be uh you know well enhanced during a video conference so if you have varying skin tones of different people the camera usually picks up either a dark person or a light colored person so what we have done with a tunable white system is that the lighting adapts to the skin tone of the person who is speaking inside the space so each individual is well enhanced depending irrespective of their color the skin tone so this was overall uh uh project which kind of worked well uh where we can say that this is a true example of how we have blended sustainability with wellbeing uh with that i kind of end my uh presentation and uh we can look at some questions thanks mr. Thampi those were some very interesting points that you highlighted and brief journey of lighting over the years that you gave us and you also mentioned that there are already guidelines available for sustainability for wellness it is the right application by the architects and designers which is very important so we also have some audience questions and at this point i would also request mr. Karmaka to join the conversation to take some questions uh mr. Karmaka we have one question question here that you know uh mr. Praveen Thampi was talking about how sustainability has become one of the uh important features in today's buildings and smart buildings as manufacturer how are you meeting this uh demand for sustainable solutions and lighting i think it's a very important question when it comes to a lighting company we definitely have to be responsible for creating solutions and products which are sustainable because anything which we are creating necessarily has to you know support the climate change and should support the planet so how i i look at it in translating the same thing to our products and services uh is we look at a right kind of choice of components so the components which are there they have to be more energy efficient so that the efficiency of the entire solution goes goes much higher so whether the choice of components the complete efficacy of the complete luminaire and the overall intelligence which it is required for giving a complete solution so when it comes to a smart building one of the most important element as we saw in the presentation also is the need of lighting controls so that you are able to manage it properly because when a right choice of components right design of the complete product and it is back with the good intelligent controls we will be certainly able to achieve a good amount of energy saving and certainly can achieve best of the lead standards so that's how our development is happening so we have from lighting industry if you say we have a responsibility to continuously keep on raising the bar so we have a full-fledged innovation team which is working continuously on bringing intelligent solutions as well as bringing new forms and shapes and we also have a beyond innovation team we have the manufacturing setup which actually looks into how we blend together all these aspects and come out with right product and solutions. So Mr. Nambi like Partha said that you know the manufacturers are also now bringing out new advanced solutions you mentioned how products have you know improvements in products have happened over the years the specifications have changed over the years you have done projects in lot of other countries including India do you see any difference in western and you know Indian market in terms of products available for lighting? Yes I mean if you look at the overall standards itself and in terms of office lighting I would say India is far ahead of most of Europe and US and most of this country predominantly because we have indigenously now a lot of products available in India which are far superior in terms of technology so adaptation of technology has been faster in India and one of the reasons for this is because most of these large multinational companies have their large offices in India and that's why India has become a focused market in terms of and like I said this is possibly one of the only countries in the world where we have a maximum amount of nitrous happen people working in call centers I mean we are the call center of the world so that is where we have kind of adapted to new technologies in terms of lighting and like I said even NVC came up with standards much later as compared to what we were already adopting in India. Yes in terms of policy we are lagging behind but in terms of executing interesting and innovative projects in office lighting and in terms of the availability of the products today in India we have really good lighting manufacturers in India who can do really good technology based products which are really advanced. That's fantastic so India is on the right track and in fact in terms of green buildings also is India is one of the leading countries to have the number of green buildings so sustainability we are doing quite well on those standards. Again Partha I'll come to you. Other issues which I have noticed this like 80 percent of the offices even today doesn't talk about vertical illuminance and ceiling illuminance most you ask any project managers from any of I'm not naming any of them CVRIJ across the board. If you look at office lighting all they talk about is 350 lux on the table top and achieving even from there that's it. Even companies so the problem is most of these guys are the ones who are advising the companies and that is where you know the importance of good quality lighting does of course a lot of companies are realizing it bad way and they're coming up and looking at lighting consultants but even today most of it is driven by electrical consultants and all they look at is achieving those LPDs from a lead perspective and achieving those lux levels in terms of you know that B50 lux to 400 lux on the table top that's it and that's that's the sad reality. Lack of awareness among building owners and probably sometimes even the architects or designers or the building managers which is a challenge as I'm not pretty much most of the projects which I work with I have an argument with the interior designers especially in terms of the ceiling design the color of the ceiling the walls because those are important because that kind of makes the visual environment better so and then I actually have to run this whole presentation to them to make them understand why you need this otherwise it's as good as you know telling a layman as to why this is being done and now like I said there are issues where I'm facing with with the whole concept of workspaces looking more like cafes a lot of retail designers are coming in bringing in a lot of retail luminaires which are not conducive for prolonged working in an office space and I have seen people using projectors in workstations and I'm not talking about small interior designers I'm talking about large international companies which do of office design making these kind of mistakes so that's where the whole you know awareness has to come in again it's one person holding the flag does not have it has to be you know a larger awareness that has to really happen that's right and that is what this entire series is all about creating awareness among all stakeholders mr karmakam what do you have to say like what mr campi says that you know that awareness is a big problem not only among the the clients but also even the influencers the specifiers the architects and designers and they know so what do you have to say on that you must have also come across those challenges yeah certainly very very apt and relevant challenge which is there in the marketplace where the the right blend of lead and wellness is not happening so much so as a responsible player in lighting what we have done is we are first of all bringing because we can talk about something when we are you know better aware of it so we are bringing this you know this initiative and couple of other initiatives are there so we get the right kind of a knowledge base into us so which goes into our innovation which goes into our touch points in the marketplace which also goes into the solutions which we are providing some lighting designs and illumination designs which we provide to the marketplace so bringing the right kind of information and also passing on second we are doing in terms of the products yeah we we realize that everything is not available with everybody so how we are able to prioritize few things which can actually bring in right solution and that I think is a continuous journey it cannot we can never be you know complete with that and we are continuously introducing new products and it is all also about connected lighting where you know a good amount of research is required so that as you know Praveen have been mentioning about the wellness also wellness is so important and you know right kind of lighting is so important one good thing is you know incidentally or rather coincidentally and the brand promise of Hevels is better light and better life so we definitely have to bring in solutions which are supporting this claim by us right right so that's good to hear Praveen you also mentioned about the new products that have come up and now it is LED which is the latest which is you know in the lighting segment what are the new shifts that you are looking at which are going to come up in the near future or are already happening in other markets in terms of products in terms of systems so when we look at LEDs with tunable lighting and stuff like that I mean predominantly now what happens is when people talk about tunable why they talk about what's normally available in the market the chips which are available are usually between 3000 to 6500 so usually people say we have something which is 3000 to 6500 and this is tunable and that's okay and that really doesn't work you need to also look at the color spectrum because the color spectrum of the sunlight is also varying so the trend is that instead of using you know a 3000 Kelvin chip and a 6500 Kelvin chip and doing this tunable I mean usually when I specify I specify between 2000 to 8000 Kelvin which is a larger spectrum because 10,000 is really difficult to get so 8,000 is fairly good enough in terms of achieving that cool white light but we also need to understand that the color spectrum also matters because that has more of an impact than the color temperature in terms of how it affects your circadian cycle so what's new is you have these RGB WW chips which kind of does both the color tuning and the spectral tuning and you're able to then get a rich natural sunlight which can vary telecom greater and will also have those varying spectrum in terms of the wavelength so yeah that's that's the future and there are a couple of companies that are already looking at it there is also a DIN standard which now has started certifying human syndic or a circadian lighting product there are not too many products which have been certified but there are these a few guidelines which are already coming to play so when you already have a DIN standard for certifying circadian lighting that's a big thing you know then a lot of tall claims can go to west and you really have something to measure up to that's right you know so we need to have genuine products in the market any product that you would like to mention that the company has introduced we have actually done a couple of good projects in north in Bangalore and a couple of other cities where we have introduced a solution where certainly you know what the well standard needs there is upward light component as well as the downward light component and the choice of products are one end of one part of the whole solution and another very important aspect is the lighting design part of it where you know you know good designers like Praveen can actually help us in locating the products at the right you know places of the interior so that the walls are lit properly so our role gets limited that we have to be in the right zone of providing complete solution where it is meeting the requirement of the lighting designer and at the same time the product itself is also offering all the possible controls all the possible bandwidth of color changing and dimmability and also various form factors so that we are not creating huge patch luminances from the products so that's how we have also been designing the products and few are in the kitchen few more are there so we look forward to really a lot of you know dynamism in this portfolio rationalization and I look forward to a lot of such installations for us to refer to okay fantastic so there are a lot of new things coming up in Indian market as well so let me just give you two rapid fire questions we have a lot of questions but you know because of the limitation of time we'll just take two quick questions Praveen we start with you what according to you is wellness in commercial spaces or office spaces well like I said it is about how you can work in a natural environment where your circadian system is fully synchronized with least amount of glare with personalized lighting where I can adjust the lighting to my requirement and that I think to me is the most ideal scenario from from a wellness perspective inside okay fantastic parka what according to you is wellness in commercial space I would say it is it's a common sense because it should not become human centric lighting because it's like you know people are eating food for health so the light should be also for people so why human centric now it is a human centric definitely you know it is it is not a new thing human comforting light where a human being is able to have a feel of a natural light that is all the pursuit that we need to create an ambience where somebody can actually work like a natural light outside the interiors so that's what I feel okay so not a human centric but way of life now the lighting should be okay so last question smart is the future everyone talks about smart buildings smart living smart way of working so how parka as a manufacturer are you addressing the shift in the market towards smart building see one of the important things which I feel smart means smart brings intelligence long back when buildings were not smart they used to be like many hundred buildings isolated now smart means it is all integrated it's able it's it's having the best of efficiency and also providing best of the productivity for people you using this the spaces so it has to be you know very safe it has to be changing the positions as well as usages of different ambiances it should be able to communicate with different services so as a as a contributor to the industry we always keep this in the mind that our new innovations are keeping that in mind and one of the most important thing is education when we are talking to various stakeholders in the marketplace as well as internal so we are keeping that in the mind while we are you know becoming a spokesman of this shift in the market because this is the future right this is the future same question praveen to you smart is the future so how as a designer you are addressing this shift in towards smart buildings well we are already designing a lot of smart projects and yeah I mean like I said the the space where lighting today if you look at an iot-based system most of the iot-based systems are fundamentally based on a lighting management system that that's the kind of main vertebra based on which all of the iot systems work so you will possibly look at life I wear your you know for your internet comes through the light your blind get controlled anyway through the thing your meeting rooms are scheduled based on uh you know like sensors which be used in use in the lighting it will based on occupancy and availability schedule the availability of the meeting room look at how many people are occupying a space and do a lot of other data processing based on that so that's the future I mean I would look at it to say that even at waz control everything inside an office space can be controlled by an intelligent lighting management system and that that's really the future okay intelligent human centric which gives wellness to the people who are using it so these are some of the buzzwords for the lighting segment and for all of us today so thanks Mr Praveen Thampi thanks Mr Partha Tharmakar for sharing your views and for answering the audience questions whichever we could take in the given time but I'm sure our views had some very valuable takeaways from today's session and our special thanks once again to Havas India for presenting this knowledge sharing session and for the benefit of the Indian design fraternity to our speaker and to our awesome audience as well for being here sharing their time and sending in their queries so dear viewers keep watching this space as we bring to you very soon get another acclaimed design expert to share with us more about the magical world of lighting on that note thanks Mr Praveen Thampi once again for sharing your time sharing your views and being here with us on this series thanks Mr Partha Tharmakar for being here with us on this episode so thank you everyone take care and goodbye