CROSSING BEAMS | Lighting Isn’t a Universal Language (Until We Learn to Translate It)
Katia Kolovea
The message often lands before the words. You are in a bar or a club, and it’s late. The music is still playing, people are in mid-conversation, and then the lights come on. Bright. Unforgiving. The people in the room understand and do not need to be told: the establishment is closing, and it’s time to leave.
“The stakes around lighting are rising, while the way we often describe lighting, especially to non-designers, remains stuck in the same familiar lines.”
This is a version of light as a universal language that is easy to understand. Light signals. Light directs. Light reassures. Light warns. A flashing red light warns us there’s danger, a green light urges us to move, and an amber light tells us to prepare, slow down, and pay attention. On the street, flashing orange lights are often a precursor to a hazard ahead. In a building, emergency lighting shows us the exit. Across cultures, ages, and languages, the human body reads brightness, contrast, glare, rhythm, and shadow faster than it reads instructions.
In these simplest moments, light is genuinely shared. But if light is such a universal language, why do we keep struggling to explain its value—not only to those sitting at the same project table but to the wider public who live with its consequences every day?
Inside our professional circle, the vocabulary is polished, familiar, and reassuring. We talk about lighting as something that enhances architecture, adds a layer, creates atmosphere, supports a narrative, improves well-being, reveals materials, and brings surfaces to life. These phrases circulate comfortably within design conversations, particularly among lighting designers, but they do not always land in the same way with everyone else around the table.
Even within a design team, the value of light is not a given. Architects and interior designers are not immediately fluent in lighting thinking. Very often, lighting needs to be demonstrated, explained, visualized, and tested before its impact becomes clear. It requires examples, contrasts, and real references to move lighting from an abstract idea into something tangible and convincing. Language alone is rarely enough.
This is where the disconnect begins that leads to illumination being treated as an “option.” In many projects, this is why lighting designers are brought in late, after key decisions are already locked. This is also why it is often the first discipline asked to step back when budgets tighten or timelines compress.
Even when a lighting designer specifies products that are technically appropriate, tested, and carefully selected for a specific application, those recommendations are often revisited later in the process. Under financial pressure, specifications are substituted with lower quality or cheaper alternatives, without fully considering the wider impact on performance, visual comfort, energy use, maintenance, or long-term experience. What appears to be a small cost savings in isolation can quietly undermine the original intent and the quality of light people ultimately live with.
Lighting sits at the intersection of design intent and operational reality, and that intersection is becoming more demanding. Across markets, minimum energy performance requirements for lighting continue to rise, pushing efficiency, controls, and accountability higher. At the same time, discussions around light at night, glare, spill light, and visual comfort are becoming more visible, not only as environmental concerns, but as lived experience issues that directly affect how people feel in public and private spaces.
In parallel, the way light is physically integrated into architecture is changing. Luminaires are becoming smaller, embedded, concealed, or fully integrated into furniture, materials, and surfaces. Light is increasingly expected to be invisible, present without being seen, while still performing technically, experientially, and responsibly.
Meanwhile, the science around human light exposure continues to evolve. Research has shown that the timing, spectrum, and intensity of light can influence circadian rhythms and sleep, as well as that inappropriate light at night can be disruptive in certain contexts. While the application of this knowledge differs between indoor and outdoor environments, it reinforces a simple reality: light is not neutral, and its effects extend well beyond what we see.
In other words, the stakes around lighting are rising, while the way we often describe lighting, especially to non-designers, remains stuck in the same familiar lines. So, perhaps the real question is not whether light is a universal language but who we are speaking with when we talk about light and who we are leaving out.
Outside our professional circle, the conversation is rarely poetic: it’s practical, logistical, and financial. It is a story about risk, responsibility, and long-term consequences. A developer listens for program certainty, cost control, and return on investment, while the contractor focuses on buildability, coordination, substitutions, and liability. An electrical engineer is eyeing compliance, safety, loads, and emergency requirements while the facilities manager is attentive to commissioning quality, maintenance access, user complaints, and energy performance.
These are generalizations drawn from my own experience. I have seen engineers champion experience, contractors defend quality, and clients push for better lighting outcomes. These perspectives are all worth sharing. The point is not to label but to recognize that people listen through the lens of an aspect of a project for which they are responsible.
And let’s not forget the importance of the audience—the public—the people walking the streets, entering hospitals, waiting at train stations, or crossing dark parks and paths at night. They listen with their bodies—for comfort or discomfort, clarity or confusion, and safety or unease.
We often assume that our language travels intact across these worlds. It doesn’t. Not because others don’t feel the effects of lighting, but because they are listening for different signals. This isn’t an insignificant problem: it shapes outcomes and perception, and the future of our profession.
Lighting designers often speak from a place of intent: how a space should feel, be perceived, and can shape experience. However, our problem begins when we talk about lighting mainly from a design perspective, assuming that its value will be self-evident to everyone else involved. When that assumption fails, lighting is often perceived as expressive but optional, atmospheric but negotiable, desirable but non-essential. This is not a failure of appreciation. It is a failure of alignment.
Across many projects and markets, lighting is asked to justify itself late in the process, once constraints are already fixed. At that stage, the conversation often shifts abruptly from intent to compromise. Decisions are made quickly, substitutions follow, and the original purpose of the lighting strategy becomes harder to defend, not because it lacked value, but because its value was never articulated in terms others needed to hear.
Translation, in this context, does not mean simplifying or diluting the role of lighting. It means expanding the way we speak about it through examples, contrasts, and clear cause-and-effect relationships that make lighting legible to non-designers. This includes, among other things, showing how visual comfort reduces complaints and improves orientation, how glare control contributes to perceived safety, and how consistency of light quality over time protects not only the experience of a space but also the reputation of everyone involved.
We must also talk more openly about product decisions. Product quality, longevity, and maintainability determine whether lighting performs as intended for years, or whether short-term savings lead to early failures, repeated replacements, higher maintenance costs, and unnecessary waste.
When lighting is misunderstood or marginalized, the consequences rarely announce themselves immediately. They accumulate quietly across time, space, and use.
In public spaces, lighting that technically complies with standards can still feel unsafe or unwelcoming. In buildings, poor control strategies lead to confusion, frustration, and energy waste. When lighting quality deteriorates, users rarely blame the lighting strategy; the building, place, or city is at fault.
There is also a sustainability cost. Short-term substitutions often lead to premature failures and higher material waste. What appears economical at installation can become expensive both financially and environmentally over a building’s lifetime.
This is not a call for idealism. Constraints are real and budgets and programs matter. But when lighting is consistently brought into the conversation too late, or framed too narrowly, the cost is paid elsewhere.
Light will always speak before words—we feel it before we describe it and react to it before rationalizing it. The question is not whether light matters, it is whether we are willing to speak about it in ways that allow others to hear it.
Katia Kolovea is a lighting designer and communications strategist working internationally through ARCHIFOS. Her work includes leading and contributing to global lighting initiatives such as the Silhouette Awards, The Lighting Police, Women in Lighting, and the Virtual Lighting Design Community.
