Published on: August 14, 2009

(Douglas James, founder and principal of Mindseye Lighting)

Tell me more about your history. How did you get started?
I left college having studied art and photography and went straight into a job with lighting consultancy. It was a company called Lighting Design Partnership and I was with them for four or five years before  I joined another company called Into Lighting Design and stayed there for another four or five years. At that point I decided to start my own consultancy and I called it Mindseye. Initially it was just me, but within about 18 months I joined forces with two other lighting designers, and the three of us worked together for several years. We did some quite interesting work. Enough that kept us busy for a small team.

We developed a sort of signature approach which was, wherever possible, to integrate the lighting into the fabric of the architecture. A lot of people had been talking about ‘light not light fittings’ and how that’s the important thing but our experience was that most people weren’t actually delivering that. People were still designing by putting dots on drawings in plan. So what we started to do was to talk with the architects and getting them to open up part of a wall, or maybe a junction between wall and a ceiling or open some form of a slot in the ceiling, and deliver the whole light for the space from those, which would have previously in lighting design tended to be just features. Instead, we wanted to use this slot to deliver all the light to the space.

(Garden Museum, London)

So, when did you get started. Tell me more about the first project Mindseye Lighting did.
The very first project was ‘Farmacia’, Drury Lane in London. We did something a little bit unusual in there. The budget was very low and it was a pretty striped out sort of space. Rather than spending money on light fittings we wondered whether we can form a MDF panel into a shape of a letter Y, and paint it white. What we did with that is put some very simple fluorescent colored tubes on top of the Y and that lit the ceiling as a background level. We used light blue, turquoise blue for the ceiling. Inside the “knee” of the Y shape we put some fluorescents and they shone down and washed the two vertical surfaces on either side of the shop where all the products were on the shelves. So when you walked into the space you didn’t really have the sense that there was a lighting system in there. You saw just these angled panels that weren’t very intrusive and they felt like they were a part of the ceiling. These panels were delivering the light in a very specific way, but using completely standard off the shelf kind of luminaires.

Earlier you spoke about contemporary architects still designing by putting dots on the plans. How does your design process start?
We try and understand what the vision for the space is, the theme or the intention for the space  and we try to work inside that architectural syntax. Besides that we also want to understand what kind of mood the client wants in the space. A lot of that comes from the intended use of the space – for example who will the users of the space be? The overriding point, however, is how this space should feel, and how should people feel when they are in it? Those are really the starting points of our design process: to really get under the skin of the project and to inherit the thought process of the designer and the client.

From there we start to analyze what kind of light, what type of light the space needs. What amount of light, what intensity of light, where should it come from, what directionality should the light have, what characteristics should the light have in terms of colour appearance, and colour temperature, the colour rendition capabilities, those different sorts of things. We think about the different uses of the space at different times of the day. What flexibility do we need to build in, what level of automation do we need to have? That allows us to analyze the lighting needs of the space.

When we come to a point where we know what the light quality of the space needs to be, we can start thinking about where should light be generated and what light source should be generating it in order to reach that result.

The last point of the process is to come to the luminaires. “If we want the light to come from there by this type of light source, then these fitting would be suitable.”The very last thing we come to is the light fittings. It’s the end of the design process. To determine where does an individual light fitting go, and what is it doing.

(Corpus Cristie, roman catholic church in Brixton Hill, UK)

I hear you studied art and photography. What influence do you think this had on your work as a lighting designer?
I didn’t believe that it had any at the beginning. What I didn’t realize until later in my life is that actually art and photography are both undeniably studies of light. And I now realize that my starting approach towards lighting design, I believe anyway, comes from the fact that my initial interest in it is as a medium, as a sort of substance almost, if you like, in it’s own right.

What do you think the ideal mixture is? Where does in your opinion architecture stop and light begin?
That should never happen I think. The two should feel symbiotic.

(Tequila bar, Soho, London)

You say you use light to emphasize the architectural message but on the other hand you are not afraid to use strong light colors. How do these philosophies work together?
You definitely have to be very careful with the use of color, but they can work together. It’s about getting the balance right. Even if you look at the work we did at the Birmingham Rotunda building where you have these aluminum tubes hanging down with LED nodes at the end of them you can create an intense space with really beautiful blend of colors or wash of colors, but also it works really well with white light.

(Birmingham Rotunda entrance)

In one of your descriptions you used the term “über sophisticated consumer”. What did you mean by that?
I think we’re living in a generation where many of our clients are very design literate. People read design blogs and webzines. Almost all newspapers now have a section on interiors or architecture or home furnishing and things like that. The world has changed in last last decade, I think, and one of the things that has changed significantly is that you have incredibly high expectations from certain sections of the public or the consumer demographic, who are really interested in ‘experiencing’ architecture and architectural environments and they will seek them out. They will actually make that a part of their social interaction experience: they will make sure that the place they do their socializing meets their life style expectations.

(Otto Dining Lounge, Stiff and Trevillion architects)

How does this reflect into your design? Does it depend on which project you do?
We’ve developed a style of integrating lighting. It’s about being appropriate. That’s what we mean by integrated in a wider sense.

Speaking of the latter project, The Birmingham Rotunda. You’re still working on that with its LED display. How do you feel about today’s interactive light art since this is not a gesture of emphasizing the architecture itself?
I think it’s possibly a little early to call in the sense that we’re only seeing the early days of that type of technology.

On the other hand there’s obviously a danger. Even if there’s the initial ambition for one of these displays as just being an art piece it’s obviously in danger of being highjacked for commercial broadcast. Have you seen the movie Blade Runner? I would say that that is the likely logical outcome of what we’re doing now. And I think we have to be very careful about the stewardship of these installations.

In fact what’s going to happen with the display screen in Birmingham is that the stewardship of the content for that screen is going to be by the Ikon Gallery Of Modern Art in Birmingham. There’s potential in the planning application for it to have, 30% of the time, commercial content. However the planning application is quite specific that the content has to be in the spirit of the art or in the nature of an art piece. What we’ve been thinking at the moment is that there would be some kind of commercial sponsor of the art. So you might have a company who are sponsoring art or people who would possibly align their brand with the art projects. They might want to point out the fact that they are supporting it. But the thing is that it is not allowed to contain commercial sales messages. The question ‘how is the content to be managed’ is always the key issue with these things.

(Birmingham Rotunda, exterior view, work in progress)

How do you feel about today’s … lets call them “green tendencies“…like light pollution, energy efficiency,…and how do you make these things work together since in one of your statements you did say that one of Mindseye main aims is to provide an innovative and project specific design service, delivering creative lighting solutions regardless of project size or budget?
We’ve always designed in a very energy efficient way. I think you should be aware of light pollution on every stage of the design process. From the beginning when you have some drawings on a table or concept there and as soon as someone suggests an idea, mentally you’re running through a checklist. Things like energy efficiency, maintenance and light pollution are always on that checklist so it doesn’t even get beyond scribbling down on a drawing or just thinking through conceptual ideas. We’d never get beyond that part of design process.

(HSM Belfast, a part of Switched on London,2008)

We spoke about Birmingham Rotunda and its LED display. Many might find it to be a pollutant. There were also a couple more projects like HMS Belfast. You did light it heavily. I liked it very much, don’t get me wrong, but somebody might find it to be too much… where do you draw the line?
This is a balance that society has to find in the same way as, for example, we know  that motor vehicles are dangerous and we know that far too many people die on the roads every year. And yet, we all instinctively accept that risk factor because we want to be able to travel where we want to and when we want to. I’m not saying now everyone supports the use of cars, but the vast majority of society does, so we deal with it: we accept that. I think that, with things like Rotunda, society has to accept or has to deal with it itself. That the possible enrichment of people’s lives, or civic pride, in whichever case may or may not outweigh the possible downside of light pollution. What’s important in the case of these types of screens is that they should always be dimmed down at night.

I see you mostly work in GB. Any plans for the future?
Sure. In fact we have been doing some international work in the last year or so. We’ve designed two floors of retail lighting for Macy’s in New York. We’ve been working on a refurbishment project with Foster and partners for the HSBC building in Hong Kong. We also have a church which we’re working on with John Pawson Architects and that’s in Germany. That’s a very exciting project for us.

Thank you for your time.