The scientific data is conclusive in that exposure to daylight and electrical ambient light contribute to human health, generic expression, and hormonal signaling. As such, established scientific research has provided the lighting industry and designers with expanding practice models, commonly referred to as WELLNESS or Human Centric Lighting. Unfortunately this new business and practice model runs the risk of infringing on behavioral and clinical responsibility, therefore, without standardized practice guidelines or mandated specifier proficiencies in basic circadian system physiology, the science can easily be misinterpreted and thus deliver harmful unintended consequences. As such, design practitioners and manufactures alike, may soon face the very real potential for liability litigation. Attendees in this session:

• Investigated differing interpretations of research findings and learn how to apply the data from a “first do no harm” perspective
• Evaluated 2 differing wellness focused practice guidelines for delivering light beyond glare and visual acuity requirements; do they work or simply open the door for delivering unintended occupant harm?
• Explored how initial project assessment considerations such as occupant average age, prior light history, and lifestyle activity status will become a valuable information piece in order to correctly specify lighting deemed appropriate for mitigating negative impacts and benignly delivering health and wellness benefit.
• Investigated glare from a physiological perspective and learn how to evaluate light sources and luminaire optics to limit potential negative health and visual acuity impacts.
• Discovered suggested intake PROGRAMMING considerations necessary to prioritize a daylight / tuneable SSL lighting specification which limits designer liability and responsibility for negative occupant health consequences

Deborah Burnett is an internationally recognized registered interior designer, color authority, licensed general contractor, keynote presenter and former National TV personality. She is a leading authority in the practice of Epigenetic Design targeting the connection between human health and built environmental light. A past national spokesperson for Sylvania Lighting, she serves as a national spokesperson for the American Society of Interior Designers. An accomplished journalist, her interviews and articles appear in US newspapers and popular magazines including the Washington Times, Health, AARP, and Readers Digest. Her evidence based light & health articles appear internationally in Professional Lighting Design, Mondo Arc, Architectural SSL, Disano, Lume, and Bridge for Design. Most recently, Burnett was retained as the lead author for developing a built environmental WELLNESS STANDARD designed to promote occupant nighttime sleep and reduced daytime fatigue through epigenetic design interventions.

The presentation has two parts., The first will focus on the result of an anthropological study of 4 months, which ran from August to November 2014 and the second on how the findings influenced and are used in the analysis and program of a new mother-child hospital. The study aimed at understanding the user experience and took place at Rigshospitalet at Juliane Marie Center, the mother-child center of the hospital, as a part of a feasibility study of a new mother-child hospital. We wanted to focus on the user experience as a part of the feasibility study, which on other tracks also uncovers medical professional and engineering aspects of a future Juliane Marie Center.

The process consisted of thorough research and analysis followed by phases in which the vision, design principles and solutions were developed. The outcome was five bearing design principles of user experience. The vision is the result of collaboration between the Juliane Marie Centre, more than 60 users and a consulting company. The construction of a new hospital provides a unique opportunity to create a significantly better user experience than is possible within Juliane Marie Centre’s existing framework. Our ambition is to create the world’s best hospital for treatment of children and families – nothing less. The four main phases of the study were: 1. Research 2. Analysis 3. Vision and design principles 4. Solution Examples.

Naja Lynge Rasmussen is a Danish architect who since graduation from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture in Copenhagen has worked to create architecture based on user needs. The last seven years as part of the team on Rigshospitalet’s mega-projects: The North Wing, 55,000 m2 hospital under construction and lately the feasibility study for a hospital for women giving birth, children and young people, about 50,000 m2. Rigshospitalet is situated in Copenhagen and is Denmark´s leading university hospital for patients needing highly specialised treatment.

In the beginning of the 20th century, light served as a preventive and healing element in architecture. However, with the prevalence of penicillin in the 1940´s, attention was drawn towards a more medical treatment rather than prevention through architecture. In my doctoral dissertation “Light, Architecture and Health” at Aarhus School of Architecture 2013, I put renewed emphasis and focus upon light and architecture and their shared significance to health and argued for a better balance between light and darkness. The conclusion is that it is possible to base the architecture on a healthier light if the architecture is partly planned deliberately according to the sun and to the East, South, West and North, and partly in relation to the body’s circadian rhythm.

Forgotten Knowledge and the Worship of the Sun during Modernism Thanks to a thorough job, first revealing a collection of ‘forgotten knowledge’ based on historical sources and field studies of modernist buildings, which, in their architecture, were built upon health-related intentions, I will discuss the knowledge we have about light and health today, and argue that modernism and its strategy for optimizing the sun no longer seems to work. The same goes for modern glass architecture which unbridled opens up towards the sunlight using ‘unhealthy’ solar protective glass. It is about finding a balance between exposure to and protection from the light of the sun.

The Sunlight and the Circadian Rhythm of the Body.

This balance will exemplify through practical light experiments with the geographical orientation, the Danish weather and the body’s circadian rhythm. Through new experimental setups and the development of a new method of representation, “Simultaneous Time-lapse Photography”, he portrayed and maintain differences in light over time and place. This applies both in terms of the geographical orientation and the annual differences, at summer solstice, equinox and winter solstice, respectively. Based on field studies and studies of light, he suggested an overall architectural approach to a healthier light, a strategy which responds the asymmetrical light of the sun by being – in itself – asymmetrical. Be it in the form of asymmetrical building shapes, facades, apertures or artificial lighting. Two case studies. The accumulated knowledge about light, architecture and health is used and applied in an actual hospital construction project in Denmark:

1) The New Herlev Hospital: A consortium consisting of, among others Henning Larsen Architects and Friis & Moltke Architects won the competition in 2011 – based on two symmetrical, round buildings with glass facades designed for optimizing the daylight, the intake of daylight is balanced in an asymmetrical architecture.

2) The State Hospital: The results of an ongoing research project at the Psychiatric Center 0 in Copenhagen, where the asymmetrical sunlight and its effect on depression and sleep are studied and discussed. Through these case-studies, I will present knowledge about sunlight and health implemented in practice and discuss how this way of thinking light and health can be implemented in future architecture and influence our way of working with light in the future.

Carlo Volf is an architect working in the field of hospital architecture. He works with a scientific and interdisciplinary research based approach and currently contributes with new knowledge and new research based design methods in the planning of hospitals. After finishing his Ph.D. dissertation “Light, Architecture and Health – a Method” in 2013, he has been focusing on sunlight and solar architecture. Carlo Volf has been nominated in the INDEX Award with a case in the category Design to improve life and currently he is working on a project at The State Hospital in Copenhagen. Carlo Volf is appointed censor at Aarhus School of Architecture and at The Royal Academy of Architecture and Design and a member of the VELUX Denmark Daylight Jury.

This research set out to examine if access to sunlight in the home is a factor contributing to the psychological health and wellbeing of residents of social housing in Glasgow. A pilot study was undertaken in October 2012, involving a survey of 40 residents living in flats of four tower blocks in the Shawbridge area of Glasgow (24 male, 16 female). Psychological health and wellbeing was assessed using two measures: (i) WEMWBS – the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale; Mental wellbeing; and (ii) GHQ-12 – the General Health Questionnaire; Psychological distress. Sunlight received indoors was modelled using Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES) software (annual average, m2 hr/yr). Separate calculations were made for each room and the level of occlusion from curtains and blinds was taken into account (recorded at the time of survey). Analyses were undertaken for (i) the sample as a whole (n = 40); (ii) a sub-sample of individuals who typically spent 2 hours or more in their living room each day (n = 18). Exploratory analysis indicated that the living room was the room that was used most during daylight hours. Mental wellbeing scores ranged from 21-70 with a mean of 49 (SD = 12.2). Psychological distress scores ranged from 0-12 with a median of 2.5 (IQR= 5). There was no significant differences in average scores between men and women. Modelled total sunlight for each dwelling (with occlusion from curtains and blinds included) ranged from 0 to 6703 m2 hr/yr, with a mean of 2500 m2 hr/yr (SD = 1655). For the living room values ranged from 0 to 4567 m2 hr/yr, mean = 1740 m2 hr/ yr (SD = 1295). Mental wellbeing was found to be positively associated with living room modelled sunlight (r = .357, p < 0.05), but after controlling for key confounding variables, sunlight was not a significant predictor of mental wellbeing. No significant association was found between sunlight and the psychological distress measure. For the sub-sample of individuals who typically spent 2 hours or more in their living room each day, mental wellbeing was positively associated with living room sunlight (r = .733, p = 0.001), and also for the flat as a whole (r = .553, p = 0.017). There was no significant associations between sunlight and level of psychological distress. Further analysis of the data is currently in progress, including regression analyses for the sub-sample; use of daylight data for the month of October only; relationships with environmental monitoring data (temperature, humidity, air quality); and exploration of sample characteristics in relation to curtain/blind habits.

Lynette Robertson is a research scientist based in the Mackintosh Environmental Architecture Research Unit (MEARU) within Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art. Following a PhD in Geoscience from Edinburgh University in 2005, she spent a number of years as a data scientist, and subsequently an atmospheric dispersion modeler at the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA). Since 2010 she has worked in environmental and architectural design research with a focus on human health and wellbeing, and in particular the health benefits of contact with nature and urban green spaces. Prior to joining MEARU in September 2014, Lynette worked as a Research Associate and Research Fellow on a number of large collaborative research projects at OPENspace Research Centre at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. A passionate advocate of urban greening and growing, alongside her academic research, Lynette also works to promote green infrastructure technologies in Scotland through contributions to the work of the Scottish Green Infrastructure Forum (SGIF), and as an independent urban greening consultant.

Evidence on how the luminous environment is experienced by occupants is the subject of this work. The aim is to contribute to improved school design by addressing the gap in the designers’ and policy makers’ understanding of how building occupants perceive daylight; how they respond to daylight performance values; and how their needs and actions shape the operational daylight performance of classrooms. Exploring the above in a live learning environment is hampered by difficulties involving the collection of subjective data from children (and) access for continuously monitoring daylight performance and occupant interaction with the building design and its systems.

The need for evidence is all the more pressing for two reasons. The first relates to the 2013 UK schools daylight guidelines, introduced by the Education Funding Agency through the Priority Schools Building Programme. The use of climate based daylight modeling metrics to deliver the government’s new standards instead of the widely used daylight factor has ignited a heated debate, concerning the adequacy of existing metrics and benchmarks to guide designers toward the development of designs that translate into well daylit schools. The second reason involves the changing visual needs of classrooms due to the increasing reliance of modern teaching methods on visual display technologies, such as smart whiteboards and tablets.

A mixed method approach is described in order to establish the relationship between daylight levels and occupant behaviour in the ‘live’ environment of a classroom used as a case study. The quantification (and mapping) of the luminous environment is achieved by means of High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging: a method followed in order to record luminance data on an image that closely resembles what is seen by the human eye. Additionally, HDR imaging enables non-intrusive continuous monitoring for extended periods of time (e.g. a month or longer) and allows recording of the interaction of occupants with controls such as electric lights and blinds, as required to satisfy their visual needs.

The qualitative side of the approach employs the Grounded Theory Method (GTM); a systematic procedure used as a tool to generate theory when a process, action or interaction is not adequately explained by existing theories. In accordance with the emerging research design, a classification of GTM, theory emerges from the data collected and not from preset categories. Data is sourced by means of questionnaires, focus groups and interviews involving students, teachers and school staff. This approach provides valuable information on the various tasks occupants perform in a modern classroom and the subsequent visual needs that arise. Furthermore, it explores the rationale behind observed actions and allows for the investigation of behavioral patterns that correspond to specific daylight design elements of the case study. Finally, the association of qualitative and quantitative data adds meaning to subjective occupant responses enabling the quantification of experienced daylight, while providing evidence of the real world daylight performance in occupied classrooms.

Nafsika Drosou is a second year PhD student in the School of Civil and Building Engineering of Loughborough University in the UK. With a background in Civil Engineering from the University of the Philippines, her professional experience includes working on housing projects of a real estate and development firm in Manila. In 2010 she completed an MSc in Low Carbon Building Design & Modelling at Loughborough University. She then joined Portsmouth University, School of Architecture, as a research assistant on SILCS (Strategies for Innovative Low Carbon Settlements), an EU Interreg IVC project. Returning to Loughborough University, she completed an MRes in Energy Demand Studies with a scholarship from the London-Loughborough EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Research in Energy Demand which also covers her PhD.

The design of learning environments is a challenging, yet highly interesting field for many architects due to the complexity of factors affecting the creative process. Learning spaces are not merely an accommodating framework for students and teachers; the physical environment, if designed with consideration, can be one of the most influential factors for successful learning. In order to achieve spaces of high quality for students and teachers, the architect must be able to materialise the latest pedagogical and didactical theories in relation to the specific academic program for the school – taking into account cost constraints, building technological considerations and the conditions of the building site.

The design of learning spaces should support the applied methods of teaching in the best possible way. A number of factors influence our spatial perception, and as such, form part of the architectural process; e.g. spatial organization, materials and indoor climate. Especially daylight conditions in schools have been subject to extensive research over the years. In 1874 Robson stressed the importance of daylighting in classrooms in the book ‘School architecture: practical remarks on the planning, designing, building, and furnishing of schoolhouses’. In a Danish context, the school ‘Skolen ved Sundet’ from 1938, is an early example which reflects the belief that daylight supports the wellbeing of students. Today, access to daylight is a mandatory factor in school architecture, and much research has focused on how daylight affects human comfort and learning capabilities. The impact of daylight on the health, social interaction and learning achievements of students in indoor spaces, is well documented.

The present paper focuses on the implementation of this knowledge in architectural practices and the development of procedures for continuous assessment of quantitative and qualitative daylight performance throughout the design process. Further, the paper addresses recent research into the relationship between daylight design and the overall architectural atmosphere in learning environments and the importance of viewing daylight not as an isolated factor, but as part of a holistic approach. The point of departure for discussing this subject is a case study within a Norwegian context. The considered school building – Vestmyra School in Fauske – has demanding daylight requirements due to the location in the northern part of Norway. Simulation of the daylight conditions was used as an important tool in the development of spaces, which support the project specific learning principles. The case study exemplifies how the significance of daylight is taken into account in the design process, and forms the basis for discussing how procedures can be further developed to ensure a holistic approach to the architectural atmosphere in learning environments of the future.

Stina Holm Jensen is M.Sc. in Architectural design from Aalborg University in 2012 and works as an architect in AART Architects, Oslo. Her primary field of work is learning environments and, as such, she is currently engaged in the development of three school buildings in Norway. As part of the research team “AART Green” she works with sustainability as an integrated part of the design process, specializing in the role of daylight for the health and wellbeing of the people who inhabit our built environment.

The question of successfully providing daylight to people has two distinct sets of solutions: We can try to get more people outside or more daylight inside of buildings. Ideally, we follow both approaches synchronously. In order to do so requires integrated urban design approaches that holistically address questions of creating comfortable outdoor spaces, providing sufficient amenities to accomplish high walkability levels (people have to do something outside) and finally accomplishing sufficient access to daylight within buildings. Such daylighting oriented design ambitions naturally clash with other pressures that cities experience such as rising densities due to population growth, the desire to increase resource efficiency of buildings and economic expectations. This presentation draws on a series of inter-related projects at MIT’s Sustainable Design Lab which involve the development of an urban modeling platform for daylighting, outdoor comfort, human powered transportation, operational and embodied energy as well as the application on these modeling schemes to urban projects in Boston, Kuwait, Lisbon and Riyadh. The results will be presented in the context of where the opportunities and challenges for daylighting lie in a densifying world.

Christoph Reinhart is a building scientist and architectural educator working in the field of daylighting, sustainable building design and environmental modeling. At MIT he is leading the Sustainable Design Lab, an inter-disciplinary group with a grounding in architecture that develops design workflows, planning tools and metrics to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings and neighborhoods. Design tools originating from the group – such as DIVA, DAYSIM and umi – are used in practice and education in over 90 countries.

To embed the diversity and variability of human needs as foundational elements of daylighting design and put human occupants back at the core of the building question, we need to reach out to fundamental discoveries from neuroscience, biology and other fields, which will bring new insights and a deeper understanding of how we interact with our environment. The multiplicity and variability of our needs regarding (day)light exposure have indeed been a topic of investigation for years now in photobiology and psychophysics, though have not yet penetrated the design realm as dynamic models of human response.

Humans need to be in an environment conducive to health and have physiological light exposure needs, whose time- and spectrum-dependent non-visual effects we only start to understand. On the other hand, users of a space often need to perform tasks for which comfortable visual conditions are needed, to which we respond with head and gaze dynamics that psychophysics can help us better recognize.

Finally, any attentive witness to a space seeks to enjoy its play of light and dark. Perception of daylight is the primary interpreter of the materiality and dynamism of any architectural space. As a result, while daylight as a subjectively perceived visual effect is actually very hard to use as a design factor, it is often what drives decisions. It is time to bring these exciting new research perspectives back into the design realm in a way it can interactively, dynamically and effectively fuel the creative design process: we have access to the essential ingredients of human-responsive design, now we need to cook. This paper will discuss ongoing research regarding the assessment of daylighting performance by considering three interpretations of “well-being” in a space: as a human inhabitant of a living space, as a user of a (work)space, and as a witness of a delightful space.

Marilyne Andersen is Professor of Sustainable Construction Technologies and Dean of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) at EPFL. She is also head of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Performance-Integrated Design (LIPID) whose research activities focus on building performance in the architectural context in general, and the use and optimization of daylight in buildings in particular. Before joining EPFL, she was Associate Professor at MIT, USA where she founded the MIT Daylighting Lab in 2004. She holds an MSc in Physics and specialized in daylighting through her PhD at LESO, EPFL and as a Visiting Scholar at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA.

This paper explores the intersection of building envelopes and the evolution in cultural ideas about natural light, energy consumption and modulating the domestic environment through advances in passive and active technologies. By beginning with the examination of advances in building envelope performance and many tenants of high performance domestic design that are emerging from the passive house and net-zero movements this paper and the design research examples attempt to redirect the conversation back to the territory of aesthetics and the relationship of light (both artificial and natural), natural ventilation, and the ability to modulate the domestic environment seamlessly between passive heating and cooling strategies and natural ventilation.

By focusing on the aesthetic possibilities of natural ventilation and light, this paper proposes a hybridized model of design thinking. Addressing the functional and empirical performance of building envelopes is a priority that has often reduced the critical conversation around the quality of domestic space to an empirical ‘sum of the parts’ conversation. In many cases the performance of the passive envelope and the regenerative mechanical systems overshadow the discussion of the dynamics, of environmental, social, usage and physiological aesthetics. There is admittedly a large degree of economics underpinning this trend. In high performance domestic envelope design (at least in North America) there is a tendency for the higher performance natural light components (windows and skylights) to come at a prohibitive cost premium thus limiting the ability of the designer to move beyond basic environmental relationships to a more nuanced, site specific, life style oriented aesthetic agenda. Although this economic relationship is changing, few examples (designed or built) address the distribution of natural light and ventilation as a critical component of the design thinking and overall performance. The paper seeks to address this discrepancy as an opportunity of design. Conceptually all exterior surfaces of the building envelope should be an extension of the cultural ideas that drive the spatial organization, usage patterns and evolving attitudes about the domestic space therein. By utilizing advanced environmental and spatial modeling, this paper seeks to demonstrate the aesthetics of natural light in conjunction with the issues of passive heating and cooling in the high performance domestic envelope.

Three design examples are used as a basis of this argument and research. Each project is currently being developed within the architectural practice of EASTON+COMBS. This design research approaches the environmental aesthetic with a holistic methodology. A domestic building envelope must perform in 21st century design, but once considered at the scale of architecture, the spatial dynamic of the domestic environment must perform to equal degree. Curating natural light and ventilation in these environments is seen as critical to the success of the design agenda, however each design example seeks to employ a clear strategy of overall environmental performance as well as the buildings envelope performance. The design research proposes to demonstrate the performance efficiency and the quality of the design aesthetic though extensive energy modeling as well as the development of unique envelope strategies to be representationally demonstrated and documented.

Lonn Combs is an architect and co-founder of EASTON+COMBS, an award winning architectural practice with emerging international recognition in design excellence and building innovation through the convergence of material practice, integrated technological and environmental methods. Combs is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, receiving the prestigious ‘Rome Prize’ for Architecture in 2012. Lonn Combs is also Assistant Professor of Architecture and the Director of the Master of Architecture program at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. As Director, Combs leads the development of digital design, emerging fabrication, environmental analysis, and new materials within the curriculum, while also coordinating research based design studios with a commitment to architecture as a project of interdisciplinary knowledge and social engagement.

A starry night is one of nature’s most magical wonders. Yet in our artificially lit world, most of us no longer experience true darkness. In this talk based on his book THE END OF NIGHT, Paul Bogard seeks to restore our awareness of the spectacularly primal, wildly dark night sky and how it has influenced the human experience across everything from science to art. Using a blend of personal narrative, natural history, science, and astronomy, Bogard shares the importance of darkness–what we’ve lost, what we still have, and what we might regain and the simple ways we can reduce the brightness of our nights tonight.

Paul Bogard is author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light (Little, Brown, 2013) and editor of Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark (U of Nevada Press, 2008). A native Minnesotan, Paul has lived and taught in Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Reno, northern Wisconsin, and Winston-Salem. A graduate of Carleton College, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Nevada-Reno (PhD in Literature and Environment), Paul is now an assistant professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he teaches creative writing and environmental literature. Find him at paul-bogard.com.

This paper shows how semi-transparent elements separate spaces; stimulate transition and interaction between natural and indoor environment in traditional East Asia architecture. By analyzing natural lighting in courtyard housing of North China, this article discusses the semiotic function of semi-transparency in stimulating hierarchy and order in Chinese residential architecture. The author believes that the fading of comprehensive indoor lightening is an important reason for the loss of East Asian identity in architecture. He introduces some recent works in China and Japan and presents how the architects adopt semi-transparent elements to reactivate the characteristic cultural sense of East Asia.

Song Yehao, Professor, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University Beijing, and visiting professor at the Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark. He is a researcher, educator and practitioner with a long experience in sustainable architectural and urban developments in and outside China, a.o. worked in the architectural office of Thomas Herzog. His designs achieved several honours and awards. Author of numerous papers and books on sustainable design and his works pursuing neo-vernacular Chinese building design and urbanism. Yehao Songs works are focused on holistic design thinking and methods for sustainable architecture.

Le Corbusier said that: “The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.” One might add that it is also the history of the struggle for a reasonable use of daylight. Good quality daylight is linked to visual performance and comfort of those who occupy the space. Daylight creates good conditions for seeing, supports task performance, fosters interaction and communication. It influences people’s health, stimulates moods and well-being. This paper reflects on the studies done in the area of daylight design methods and principles that can be applied for architecture and urban planning strategies. The paper discusses Polish building regulations in the context of daylight design. As well as the barriers for an application of new daylight design methods into urban planning and city regeneration processes. The results of the pilot study (the questionnaire) carried out among 50 participants with mixed backgrounds in architecture, urban planning and interior architecture show a growing demand for better daylight education and an urgent demand for a revision of the existing outdated lighting recommendations in Poland. The pilot conclusions also illustrate that daylight was considered as an element of natural resources needed in the sustainable approach into urban environment planning by the questionnaire contributors equipped with the basic daylight design knowledge. The urgent need of further case-specific studies was emphasized. As well as the belief that daylight and electric light projects should be integrated and a holistic approach to town light planning should be implemented.

This paper is a part of the PhD research on daylight design within the contemporary urban texture, which focuses on a growing role of daylight in creating more sustainable residential architecture. One of the aims of this research is to identify how daylight knowledge can help to reconsider contemporary urban planning in Poland, especially with reference to a growing number of residential areas. It discusses how daylight strategies may be implemented as design methods in architecture planning. The method may potentially offer new approaches towards the residential planning design frameworks. While discussing the role of daylight in residential buildings and areas, an emphasis is put not only on an energy optimization but also on the qualities related to inhabitants’ needs, preferences and behaviour patterns. Further questions asked are: what kind of daylight design methods could be applied in early phases of residential areas planning; what elements of daylight design strategies should be present in building regulations and what educational channels should be created to propagate daylight knowledge among professionals engaged in urban planning processes.

The final conclusions of the PhD thesis may illustrate that a role of daylight in urban planning is very complex, depending on the implemented filters of objectives, from social, cultural and psychological to energy optimization objectives. The author hopes to confirm that daylight studies are crucial in the early stages of residential urban planning especially while making decisions concerning urban density, buildings location.

Natalia Sokol is a PhD researcher at the Gdansk University of Technology, Poland at the Faculty of Architecture: Urban and Regional Planning Unit. In her research she explores a role of daylight design in the early stages of urban planning focusing on the residential areas. Since her graduation from the UCL MSc Light and Lighting course she has been promoting architectural lighting design through different areas of activity from commercial lighting projects, luminaire design through educational work. Before PhD studies she had been working as a lighting designer for a Swedish company and had helped to implement almost 40 lighting products on the market.

Until recently, makers of buildings had little choice but to respond directly to local daylight conditions in order to gather or control daylight. In regions where there are extreme daylight conditions, the highest and lowest latitudes for example, architects continue to generate insightful daylighting strategies, approaches that often lead to eloquent spatial and formal ideas. Happily, these responses turn out to be more than local idiosyncrasy and are found to be widely relevant, even in mild, middle latitudes.

Meaningful and sense-rewarding architecture is a product of gathering local daylight and the use of that knowledge to generate architectural space. Our most accomplished architects have always known this and have used their understanding of the sky to receive daylight, organize space, bring coherence to buildings, select materials, and invest architecture with meaning. Appropriately daylighted space generates its own interior light, a kind of light that can only happen in that place in the world. In this way, daylight helps us develop meaningful architectural form. Gunnar Asplund’s design for the Stockholm Public Library is one such example of careful thinking about how a building is daylighted and how meaningful space is organized. Asplund’s understanding of daylight, his lifelong interest in the use of the ceiling as a sky, and his engagement of the Nordic sky to design the library’s lending room, resulted in his substitution of a flat ceilinged cylinder for his first proposal, a glazed dome over that space. Observers have generally favored a functional and economic explanation for this change. This is reasonable, as far as it goes, but it is not the whole story. Asplund himself specifically cited his interest in illumination with clear daylight as the motive for this refinement. Additionally, the flat ceiling and the tall windows in the drum’s walls control sun and daylight better than the glazed dome. This is not just because the great expanse of glazing was eliminated or due to the availability of clear glass for the windows. The white, plastered drum walls provide substantially more diffusing surface and, as our studies show, better distribute the low-angle sun and skylight – Nordic light. These decisions have never been fully recognized or investigated. The library, completed in 1928, offers Stockholm “illumination” in two senses. It admits daylight to the very center of the building, the lending room where the book collection resides, and, as Sweden’s first open-shelf library, the general public is given access with only limited supervision, to the world’s knowledge, the other kind of enlightenment. The windows encircling the lending room recognize this. It is these openings to the Nordic sky and its “midnight sun” that enable the space to be daylighted virtually twenty-four hours a day, on at least a few days every year – even if we are not always there to appreciate it. In this manner, the lending room, at the center of the library and in a building in the center of the city, is illuminated by knowledge and light from around the world.

Martin Schwartz is an architect, Associate Professor, and Associate Chair of the Department of Architecture at Lawrence Technological University in Detroit, Michigan, USA. His research concerns daylight and its broad influence on architectural and urban design. In 1991-1992, Martin was the Willard A. Oberdick Fellow at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and, in 1994, he was the Frederick Charles Baker Distinguished Professor in Lighting at the Department of Architecture at the University of Oregon. He was guest Architect-in-Residence at the Department of Architecture, at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2004. Martin recently presented a research paper, “Form and Performance: Daylight as a Generator of Space and Form in Jorn Utzon’s ‘Can Lis’ at the Fourth International Utzon Symposium in Sydney, Australia, in 2014. He writes a blog about daylight, Architecture in the Light of Day, at www.architectureinthelightofday.blogspot.com. He is the author of the book, Gunnar Birkerts: Metaphoric Modernist, published in 2009.

To quantify buildings daylighting performance, most standards dealing with environmental quality and energy efficiency, such as LEED, BREAM, CERTIVEA or DGNB, mainly rely on daylight factor values (DF). Besides the fact that this approach is not intuitive, it also does not take into account the orientation nor the localization of the project.

The use of a more “concrete” notion such as Daylighting Autonomy (number of hours during which the use of artificial lighting is not necessary) would be more useful to building owners or designers in so far as it gives them the opportunity to estimate the energy consumption due to electric lighting, which is key information.

A lot of work was done on this subject within the last decades: CIE charts [1] and Swiss contributions based on diffuse daylight (ASE [2], DIAL-? Europe project [3]), developments from Nabil, Mardaljevic and Reinhart based on global daylight [4],[5], or ADEME publications [6]. Nevertheless, it appears that, in practice, building professionals actually do not know what are the affordable targets to match. The common sense suggests that the potential for an office building located in the northern part of Germany should dramatically differ from the one of a primary school in Portugal, but information simply does not exist.

This presentation proposes to provide the designers with a table of correspondence between DF values and Diffuse Daylighting Autonomy for the European area. This table should be used to address questions such as: “Which coverage of my lighting needs could be achieved with a 2.5% Daylight factor?”

Bernard Paule is co-founder and manager of Estia SA. The company is located in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) Innovation Park (Lausanne, CH), and is offering services in building-physics and sustainable development in architecture (specialized in daylighting and building energy efficiency). Author and designer of the DIAL-Europe & DIAL+ softwares, Bernard Paule is currently involved in the IEA SHC Task 50 “Advanced Lighting Solutions for Retrofitting Buildings” (co-leader of Subtask C dealing with Methods & Tools). He is part-time lecturer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), and is also involved in the Lighting Minergie® training courses.

In this talk he demonstrated the new capabilities of the Velux Daylight Visualizer and show how it enables accurate and fast simulations of complex daylighting including light pipes. He also described how models from the Daylight Visualizer can be exported to KeyShot in order to create photorealistic images of a 3D model with an accurate representation of both daylighting and electrical lighting from IES lights. In effect these two tools makes it easy and fast to both simulate and visualize complex (day) lighting in architectural models.

Henrik Wann Jensen is the Chief Scientist at Luxion – makers of KeyShot, and he is a professor at the University of California at San Diego, where he is working in the computer graphics lab. His research is focused on realistic image synthesis, global illumination, rendering of natural phenomena, and appearance modeling. His contributions to computer graphics include the photon mapping algorithm for global illumination, and the first technique for efficiently simulating subsurface scattering in translucent materials. He is the author of “Realistic Image Synthesis using Photon Mapping,” AK Peters 2001.

He has rendered images that have appeared on the frontcovers of the National Geographic Magazine and the SIGGRAPH proceedings. He previ ously worked at Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Weta, Pixar, and at mental images. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Denmark. He is the recipient of an Academy Award (Technical Achievement Award) from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for pioneering research in rendering translucent materials. He also received a Sloan Fellowship, and was selected as one of the top 10 scientists by Popular Science magazine.

Achieving an adequate entrance of daylight in working environments is extremely important, not only for energy savings purposes but also to ensure users’ wellbeing and health. It is indeed well known that light has a strong impact on people: for example, it influences the human circadian system which regulates the timing of several biological processes (known as circadian rhythms) inside our body.

To keep a 24h cycle, the human circadian system needs to be synchronized every day by an adequate exposure to light and for millennia daylight was the main light source available, therefore it is the main zeitgeber of the circadian system. The importance of keeping a 24h cycle lies in the fact that circadian disruption, which happens when the circadian system’s period is not 24 hours, has been linked to several health diseases. At the present time it is not completely understood how the circadian system works, but it is known that its response to a light stimulus depends on light’s intensity, SPD, duration and timing of exposure. Therefore to evaluate the circadian impact of daylight in indoor environments it is necessary to analyze its characteristics at the eye level of the users located inside the environment. In this paper the results of measurements carried out in three offices, with different exposures, located in Naples (Italy) during different seasons (winter, spring, summer and autumn) will be illustrated. These measurements were performed every hour, using a Konica Minolta CS 2000 spectroradiometer and a Konica Minolta T10 luxmeter, and include sky SPDs and CCTs, desk and outdoor illuminances as well as spectral irradiances, illuminances and CCTs measured at the eye level of a person seated at the desk.

Eye level spectral irradiances were also used to predict the photo activation of the different photopigments in the human eye, which are linked to the circadian system, using the Irradiance Toolbox developed by Lucas et al. The goal is to perform an evaluation of daylight’s characteristics in these offices which takes into account not only visual aspects of daylight but also non visual ones by analyzing the light that reaches the users’ eyes.

Alessia Pedace is a PhD student in Lighting Engineering at the Department of Energy, Information Engineering and Mathematical Models of the University of Palermo, Palermo (Italy). After graduating in Architecture at the University of Naples “Federico II” (Italy) with an MSc thesis on non visual effects of light, she continued her research activity in this field at the Department of Industrial Engineering of the same University. Her research project involves the analysis of lighting quality in indoor environments taking into account both visual and non visual responses to light.

Nowadays there exists considerable knowledge and focus on how daylight increases our physical and mental well-being, as well as our performance. Particular weight is placed on how to bring daylight into buildings in order to reduce the building’s overall energy consumption and to improve the indoor climate within a more complex framework of regulations.

With focus on daylight provisions as well as energy consumption, different daylight metrics have been assessed with the aim to create a basis for recommending a common daylight metric for the European Daylighting Standard. The assessment contains an evaluation of advantages and disadvantages of each metric, including the challenges by moving from a static to a dynamic climate-based daylight metric.

The following metrics are included in the analysis:

– The Daylight Factor (DF)
– The continuous Useful Daylight Illuminance (UDIcon)
– The continuous Daylight Autonomy (DAcon)
– The maximum Daylight
Autonomy (DAmax)

The sensitivity of the various daylight metrics is investigated via a parametric study according to different design alternatives and conditions in order to create an understanding of their sensitivity towards different parametric changes. Changes in different design parameters, as well as changes in orientation and location, are taken into account in the evaluation.

The parametric study is performed with the program iDbuild, which is developed as an early-stage design tool in an integrated design process of low-energy buildings. iDbuild can provide a combination of both energy and daylight conditions and it is an easy assessment tool in a parametric study.

The study showed that the dynamic metrics are very sensitive towards changes in orientation and location as well as façade design. Additionally, it is seen that the sensitivity towards a certain parameter is not the same according to the locations. E.g. the sensitivity towards the different orientations shifts with the location, thus the orientation is seen to influence more in some locations than others. The Daylight Factor on the other hand is a static metric and is therefore neither sensitive towards location nor orientation. When it comes to changes in façade design, the Daylight Factor only shows a minor sensitivity when compared to the dynamic metrics. The analysis of the shifting sensitivity towards locations is an important factor when evaluating a common European daylight metric, and contributes to a more detailed picture of the assessment tools of the variable daylight conditions in Europe. Concerning the energy consumption in combination with the dynamic daylight metrics the correlation is seen to be complex. Both the dynamic daylight metrics and the energy consumption changes in relation to orientations and locations, but the changes in the dynamic daylight metrics does not necessarily show whether the changes will have a positive or negative impact on energy consumption. The correlation between the dynamic metrics and the energy consumption concerning different design parameters is therefore seen to shift when for instance the location shifts. It was found that the dynamic metrics were relatively easily calculated, and a combination of the dynamic metrics UDIcon and DAmax, together with the effect on energy consumption, is preferable when evaluating the daylight conditions from different design options.

Sophie Stoffer and Kathrine Brejnrod is research assistants at Lighting Design Research at the Department of Engineering at Aarhus University in Denmark. Their professional interest is a holistic approach on how day- and electric lighting is integrated in building spaces with focus on the architectural expression, energy performance and occupants’ wellbeing. Their background is Architectural engineering, with specialization in integrated building Design, Aarhus University, Graphical Art at Graphical School in Aarhus and Group and Organization Psychology at University College Copenhagen (UCC).

This paper presents the designers view on daylight design in new and refurbished buildings. The inevitable turn of the building sector to sustainable design techniques has brought daylight analysis to the center of attention. Buildings with an enhanced daylight performance have minimized energy requirements and an improved indoor climate. However, assessing daylight conditions is somewhat adhered to old-fashioned methods, as building regulations and schemes in most countries are not updated to research findings.

Daylight Factor is the most widely used method of establishing compliance with building codes and credits within environmental assessment schemes such as BREEAM, DGNB etc. As much as this method is easy to comprehend and apply, it leaves the designer a lot of space to produce a building with uncomfortable or energy intensive daylight conditions. That is because DF takes no account of the building location, façade orientation or varying sky conditions. Moreover it provides no indication of glare or visual comfort nor is the solar shading taken into account. The latter is of increasing importance in low energy buildings since the solar shading is more often used and is vital for the expected performance of the building. Instead, the introduction of climatebased daylight calculations that rely on hourly meteorological data over the year, form much more accurate, yet simple measures of the daylight conditions in a building. That is because they make daylight assessments tailored to each building, whilst producing information on lighting energy savings, indoor illuminance conditions and occupant comfort. Climate based daylight metrics could effectively replace daylight factor in regulation and scheme requirements. So far the DA and UDI methods are applied by the UK Education Funding Agency for the evaluation of designs submitted for the Priority Schools Building Programme (PSBP). Furthermore a variation of DA, the so-called Spatial Daylight Autonomy (sDA) is used in the environmental ration system LEED v4.

An example with four shadings shows that the solution achieving the lowest daylight factor in the examined room was actually the solution with the most hours/working year of useful illuminance levels and with adequate daylight autonomy. So by accounting for the bespoke climatic annual conditions of the building as well as its location, the design decisions for improved daylight can be altered. It underlines the importance of using the right daylight criteria in the design phase and hence also update the existing regulations and schemes to Climate Based Daylight metrics.

Elpida Vangeloglou is a Sustainability Engineer at the High Performance Buildings department of Ramboll UK. Her academic background is formed of an MSc in Environmental Engineering at the Technical University of Crete and an MSc in Sustainable Energy in Buildings at the Technical University of Denmark. Elpida has dedicated a significant part of the MSc dissertation she carried out as an intern at MicroShade A/S to daylight analysis and has collaboratively published an article on the subject, while her first scientific publication regarded passive design solutions.

British post-war planning guidance proposed that cities be rebuilt according to scientific principles. Mathematical tools were devised to determine built form; daylight levels within buildings were to be evaluated using a metric called the daylight factor.

The daylight factor is a measure of the illuminance within a room (usually on a horizontal plane), relative to the total amount of light that would be available under an unobstructed hemisphere with an overcast sky, expressed as a percentage. Recommendations on daylighting were expressed in terms of daylight factors in post-war guidance, including in the Code of Practice BS CP 3 Chapter 1(A) (1949) Daylight: dwellings and schools. However, statutory daylighting standards for dwellings were not introduced at this time. Instead, in 1952 the Ministry of Housing and Local Government introduced permissible height indicators, for use by local planning authorities in evaluating new housing. These indicators offered a means of assessing whether there was sufficient space between buildings to permit rooms to receive adequate daylight, based on assumptions regarding the typical size of windows. Similarly, standards affecting daylighting in dwellings, incorporated into the Building Regulations introduced in England and Wales in 1966, controlled the space about buildings rather than daylight levels within buildings.

The daylight factor is still the principal metric used in guidance on daylighting, including in the British Standards. Recent research indicates that many new-build housing schemes do not comply with recommended daylight factors, and that few architects undertake daylight factor calculations when designing buildings, a cause for concern given the proven health benefits of daylight. Some commentators argue that the daylight factor is now obsolete.

This paper will explore whether non-statutory daylighting standards, based on the daylight factor, were effective in promoting good daylighting in housing in England and Wales. The study draws on archival material, and on interviews with practising and retired architects. It will be argued that many of the daylight prediction techniques developed around the daylight factor were difficult and time consuming to use. For example, the methods developed in the 1950s by the BRS (Building Research Station) for calculating daylight factor at a point, and which were incorporated into the British Standards, required a three-stage process; the externally reflected, internally reflected and sky components had to be calculated separately. An alternative approach was to use photoelectric cells, which could be placed in a building or model, but this required specialist equipment and a high degree of skill. In addition, this method was only really effective when used in conjunction with an artificial sky, which allowed the effects of diffuse light from an overcast sky to be measured independently of the effects of direct sunlight.

Given the time and skill required to utilise these daylight prediction techniques, practitioners rarely used them, except where required by funding bodies or Local Planning Authorities; requirements to use such techniques were rare in the design of housing. Daylight prediction methods developed around the daylight factor were useful in establishing objective standards. Also, crucially, architects who became familiar with such techniques often developed a robust understanding of the science of daylighting, even if they did not calculate daylight factors for every building they designed.

Alan Lewis is a Research Associate in the Manchester Architecture Research Centre at the University of Manchester, UK. His research focuses on the intersection of Government policy and architectural practice, with a particular interest in the production of design guidance and the study of its effects on the built environment. He trained as an architect before completing a PhD in Architecture at the University of Sheffield in 2006. He then worked at the University of Sheffield until 2011, when he moved to the University of Manchester.

Sweden is a country which experiences pronounced seasonal variations in daylight. In the winter months, overcast skies predominate so both the duration and intensity of daylight is often extremely limited. Although the general population spends the majority of these darker months indoors, the amount of daylight allotted in both existing and newly constructed Swedish buildings has been reduced over the past decade. Without quantitative legislation for daylight, this trend will continue.

This paper (1) traces the history of Sweden’s failed daylight legislation from the mid 1970’s, (2) identifies the primary factors contributing to the trend of reduced daylight in buildings, and (3) outlines the ongoing process of reawakening and modernizing existing legislation, and the inherent challenges this presents. Stakeholders are identified and the anticipated consequence of the legislation on these groups is discussed. The lessons learned from the above are summarized in general terms applicable to parallel markets in other countries. The failure of Sweden’s initial attempt at daylight regulation over the past forty years has been the result of a number of factors acting concurrently. One of these was the difficulty of applying manual computational methodologies of the time. With daylight regulation mired in uncertainty and nearly forgotten, market trends have been given priority. Increasing urban density, maximizing interior space, increasing energy efficiency as well as a number of current architectural fashions have been the main factors adversely affecting use of daylight. The first three of these trends are expected to persist and intensify both in Sweden and abroad. It should also be noted that these factors seldom act in isolation but rather in chorus with one another. In Sweden, the trend towards environmental certification of buildings has provided a degree of relief. The mandatory daylight requirement of the popular domestic environmental certification system, ‘Miljöbyggnad’, has prompted the Swedish building code authority to provide much needed clarification in their newly released version of the building code. Numerous challenges remain however. The first step in solving this puzzle is the creation of a standardized national calculation methodology. A re-examination of the applicable threshold values will also be needed.

Generally speaking however, the most important challenge to the success of daylight regulation would seem to be gaining the support and confidence of the building industry and those responsible for enforcing the building codes. The support of both being essential to a viable and well-functioning daylight legislation.

Paul Rogers is an architect and Sustainability Coordinator at BAU Architects in Stockholm. A registered BREEAM assessor, he specializes in daylight certification of buildings. He is founder of the LinkedIn discussion forum ‘Svensk dagsljusberäkning’ (Swedish daylight calculation) which has over 200 members. Along with select members of this group, he is working to advance domestic daylight certification methodologies, and to help Swedish Building code authorities modernize the country’s daylight regulations.

There is currently under development a European standard on daylight. The standard when complete will be part of a set of European Standards in the area of lighting application created by CEN together with EN 12464-1 – Light and Lighting, Lighting of Work Places, Indoor Work Places and EN 15193 – Energy Performance of Buildings, Energy Requirements for Lighting. The current working group developing the standard is made up of 22 experts representing 12 different national standards bodies.

The standard proposes methods to assess various aspects related to good daylighting in buildings. It contains procedures to assess quantities of daylight reaching buildings interiors, and also minimum view toward the outside.

Also methods are proposed to rate glare protection, as well as ways to provide minimum sunlight penetration in rooms ( for dwellings , and other spaces wher sunlight is important). The target being to avoid – poorly lit spaces, the standard includes also minimum recommendations with quantitative figures. For instance, it is recommended that daylit spaces should be daylit at least 50% of annual daylight hours. Distinction is made for spaces lit from facades of from roof. Minimum recommendations can be achieved with climate based daylight modelling or computation of Daylight Factors.

Marc Fontoynont is Professor at Danish Buidling Research Institute, Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is currently running research on perception of lighting quality, energy efficiency and models of Total Cost of Ownership of lighting systems. He has been working until 2011 at ENTPE/CNRS, Lyon France. He is involved in CIE activities, European funded research projects and programmes from the International Energy Agency. He is currently the convener of TC169/WG11 addressing daylight in buildings.

Olafur Eliasson’s art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self. Eliasson strives to make the concerns of art relevant to society at large. Art, for him, is a crucial means for turning thinking into doing in the world. Eliasson’s diverse works – in sculpture, painting, photography, film, and installations – have been exhibited widely throughout the world. Not limited to the confines of the museum and gallery, his practice engages the broader public spherethrough architectural projects and interventions in civic space.

Olafur Eliasson was born in 1967. He grew up in Iceland and Denmark and studied, from 1989 to 1995, at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 1995, he moved to Berlin and founded Studio Olafur Eliasson, which today encompasses some ninety craftsmen, specialised technicians, architects, archivists, administrators, programmers, art historians, and cooks. Since the mid-1990s, Eliasson has realised numerous major exhibitions and projects around the world.

In 2003, Eliasson represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale, with The blind pavilion, and, later that year, he installed The weather project at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London. Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, a survey exhibition organised by SFMOMA in 2007, travelled until 2010 to various venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Innen Stadt Aussen (Inner City Out), at Martin-Gropius-Bau in 2010, involved interventions across Berlin as well as in the museum. Similarly, in 2011, Seu corpo da obra (Your body of work) engaged with three institutions around São Paulo – SESC Pompeia, SESC Belenzinho, and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo – and spread out into the city itself.

Eliasson’s projects in public space include Green river, carried out in various cities between 1998 and 2001, and the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007, designed together with Kjetil Thorsen.

The New York City Waterfalls, commissioned by Public Art Fund, were installed on Manhattan and Brooklyn shorelines during summer 2008. Your rainbow panorama, a 150-metre circular, coloured-glass walkway situated on top of ARoS Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, opened in 2011, and Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre, for which Eliasson created the facades in collaboration with Henning Larsen Architects was completed that same year.

As a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, Eliasson led the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments; 2009–14), a five-year experimental programme in arts education located in the same building as his studio (www.raumexperimente.net).

In 2012, Eliasson and engineer Frederik Ottesen founded Little Sun. The social business and global project provides clean, affordable light to communities without access to electricity; encourages sustainable development through sales of the Little Sun solar-powered lamp, designed by Eliasson and Ottesen; and raises global awareness of the need for equal access to energy and light (www.littlesun.com).

Eliasson lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin.

Ms. Mariana Arando & Mr. Luca Fondello are both from Argentina and are studying Industrial Design at the University of Buenos Aires in FADU (Department of Architecture, Design and Urban Planning).

The jury, consisting of experts within the fields of sustainability, innovation and marketing, had this to say on the winning design:

“At the heart of the winning lamp is a simple, poetic idea that fulfils all the competition’s criteria. In design, functionality, and name, it tells a captivating story, beautifully presented, about light’s ability to connect a community or family and create social spaces. Focusing on the way that the lamps can be joined together to create one larger lamp, the story reveals the lamps’ inherent narrative of collectivity and individuality, each one functioning equally as well on its own as it does in combination with other units. The lamp’s integrated hook exhibits both versatility and adaptability, while the large lens distributes light efficiently. Its unique shape combines with an open form, producing a lamp that is as practical as it is beautiful. The strength of the lamp’s design culminates in its international applicability, marketable equally in London and Harare, without the beauty and the functionality compromising one another.”

The production of the winning lamp will take place at the end of 2015. The VELUX Group will donate 14,500 solar lamps distributed by Plan International to local entrepreneurs in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Senegal. The distribution model employed is very similar in concept to micro loans, in which small local entrepreneurs who cannot obtain loans under normal circumstances due to a lack of steady income or collateral are offered small loans that can help their businesses get started. To get their sales started, these entrepreneurs will initially receive a stock of Natural Light lamps for free. Once they have sold their stock, the result is a profit for themselves and also the capital to purchase additional lamps to sell, establishing their own self-sustaining small businesses.