Lighting in extreme laboratory environments
Today’s laboratory and research environments must account for digital capabilities, be more flexible and more collaborative spaces. Lighting expert Christopher Rush explores the critical role of lighting in defining the future of labs.
As labs and workspaces adapt to meet evolving trends, so must our design thinking. Scientific research spaces are in increasingly high demand and the requirements of these spaces are changing at an equally rapid rate.
Today’s laboratory environments must account for advanced digital capabilities, more flexible, collaborative spaces, and new human and health-centric design accommodations. Responding to these shifting needs, thoughtful lighting design solutions will play a critical role in defining the future of our labs.
Flexibility
In the past, lab design emphasized benchmarking and replication. Agreeing on light level criteria for a new wet lab, for instance, often included a visit to the principal researcher’s existing space to set expectations for the new space. With evolving space usage patterns, experimentation priorities, and workspace needs, these benchmarks carry less weight than they used to. More than that, the urgent need for energy consciousness and climate action has placed significant pressure on lab designers to cut back on blanket lighting design of high brightness throughout entire lab spaces.
Throughout the industry, there is an understanding that variety and variability across designs can spark greater comfort, productivity, and creativity across research teams. Buildings are increasingly providing greater variety between traditional private offices, huddle rooms, reservable private workspaces, and open collaboration spaces, in addition to open and closed labs. Lighting designers must recognize and expand upon this degree of flexibility — addressing the many potential occupant expectations.
Princeton Frick Chemistry Laboratory, image courtesy of Warren Jagger
Light dimming fell out of favor during the era of fluorescent light, but LEDs have revived it. Now most LED systems include basic dimming capabilities as standard. Lighting flexibility doesn’t just mean dimming though, it also means varieties in lighting mode, like diffuse, ambient light for collaboration or focused, direct light for high-intensity visual tasks. Flexibility also means considering the balance between overhead and local task lighting, as well as the possibility of demountable or adjustable task lights for occupants to readily adapt labs and workspaces to suit their needs.
Healthy design
Other human-centric design principles are also enabled with modern lighting technology, like LEDs engineered with output spectrum options. Wherever daylight isn’t available in controlled environments or extreme or remote research facilities, carefully designed electric lights can help reinforce day-night cycles for occupant circadian rhythms. Sufficient blue-spectrum light promotes better sleep patterns and overall occupant health by encouraging our bodies’ daily hormone cycle, which evolved over millennia of spending our days more outdoors than indoors.
In light of the COVID-19 crisis, it’s also critical to consider designing for current and future pandemic situations. Ultraviolet light has been used for decades in tuberculosis wards to help reduce airborne disease spread through room air, and research into new spectrum options and LED sources is ongoing.
During and after COVID-19, this technology deserves greater consideration outside of hospital environments, whether for high-volume transportation applications, or as an assistive technology to eventually and more confidently re-occupy seminar rooms and lecture halls. For laboratories and researchers, having ultraviolet germicidal irradiation technology options may even help medical and vaccine researchers work more safely, even during an ongoing pandemic.
A stairwell at Princeton's Frick Chemistry Laboratory, image courtesy of Morley Von Sternberg
Right-sized lighting design
Thoughtful lighting design can help address many concerns for laboratories including flexibility, occupant comfort, and energy sustainability. An old design approach might have agreed to 75 foot-candles (the US-centric measure of light on a surface, similar to lux) for lab benches with a client, and then applied that to as many square inches of work area as possible to avoid missing any important task area. But that approach also wastes energy and material resources for areas that don’t require such brightness. More nuanced discussions can establish better-considered lighting levels and help meet energy reduction targets.
Unlike in some other countries, lighting design is not strongly codified in the United States. Owner’s requirements and industry guidelines largely dictate lighting design as opposed to the much lower US code-minimum requirements. In the United States, the Illuminating Engineering Society’s Handbook and Recommended Practice pamphlets are widely accepted though not always carefully applied design guidelines and would not blanket a lab building with 75 foot-candles. Requirements vary from 15 foot-candles for dedicated on-screen digital work to 30 foot-candles for mixed workspaces and 50 foot-candles for detailed work areas and lab benches with small text on instruments and vials or scribbled notes and sketches.
Building physical flexibility or modularity into designs can benefit occupants looking for flexible workspaces, but also help build confidence in fit-for-purpose design. It’s easier to provide light selectively if it’s easy to adjust and relocate lights during space reconfigurations.
Laboratory lighting has always been a specialized topic, with various lighting spectra, ratings, shielding, and controls requirements for cleanrooms, vivaria, imaging, and optics labs. Adding flexible and human-centric design principles requires proactive designers to more carefully establish design criteria. Occupants will increasingly expect varying or dimmer-controlled spaces for digital work, rather than overly lit lab benches everywhere, and the importance of energy reduction and climate action has increased the urgency of this shift.
With health concerns top of mind, savvy clients will seek amenities with data-based circadian lighting schemes and germicidal ultraviolet disinfection. Lighting the laboratory of the future will mean holistically addressing each of these needs.
