The amount of lighting needed in an office is pretty well defined by a host of federal regulations and industry standards.
Jill Cody hopes you’ll go beyond those standards, however. Beyond the point of just getting by and meeting the technical standards to the point of making light a more positive force in an office environment.
Cody last fall joined the Milwaukee office of the architecture, engineering and planning firm of Hamel, Green and Abrahamson (HGA), bringing to southeastern Wisconsin some of the insights the firm had already been providing out of its Minneapolis office. She’s one of fewer than a dozen lighting designers in the area who are unencumbered by ties to a product vendor. She has earned a Lighting Certification through the National Council on Qualifications for the Lighting Profession, is an associate of the International Association of Lighting Designers and a member of the Illuminating Engineering Society.
When HGA brought her on board last October, it was as a part-time employee – a situation which would allow the firm to gauge the demand for the new service. The demand was there; in November she became a full-timer.
Raised in Minnesota, Cody moved out West with her family when she was in high school. Her parents eventually moved back, but by then Cody was in college and decided to stay, first attending the University of Nevada and later San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, Calif. Living in Modesto as a single mother, Cody saw reasonable housing become unaffordable and a culture laden with stress.
She decided to return to Minnesota, but a friend in Milwaukee convinced her to move here, instead.
It’s been great ever since. "I met my new husband. I can afford to live here. The 12-minute commute is nothing. And I never have to hear about the drought," she says, the drought part referring to the constant concerns about water out West.
And then there’s the job where she can help light up the world.
Lighting design is her "second career," as she earlier had worked as an environmental consultant. The technical knowledge from those early years would play into her new career. While studying interior design, she took a course in lighting and found within that discipline the happy marriage of technical demands and design elements. The lights went on, so to speak.
Lighting is often part of the work of engineers, Cody notes – engineers who are looking at how much light to use and, in many cases, looking to reduce glare in computer-screen-filled offices. Lighting designers add the element of how that light affects the look of a facility – inside and out, and how that light affects the way people work. She sees lighting design as being at the intersection of architecture, engineering and interior design.
Much has been said about the impact of lighting on work. Little has been proved. But a study now under way aims to change that, seeking to determine whether there is quantifiable evidence that good lighting can increase productivity and efficiency.
If that can be shown, "it will take off," Cody says of the lighting design field. "If you can gain five minutes of productivity per day, that pays for itself," she adds, commenting on the current extra cost of providing good lighting. And right now, no one knows whether it’s five minutes per day, 15 minutes per day, or some other factor.
Such information will help justify the additional upfront costs that come with good lighting, although those costs are coming down, Cody says. (Operationally, costs of good lighting are comparable to gloomy lighting, she says.)
In the meantime, she’s doing her part to shed some good light on the common gloominess of office interiors.
March 29, 2002 Small Business Times, Milwaukee
