It's my pleasure now to introduce you to the next speaker, Philip Raphael. He's going to share with you his experience of lighting for health and well-being in the workplace. Philip is a highly experienced lighting designer with a passion for creating captivating lighting experiences. With more than 18 years of expertise in hospitality, workplace, facade and landscape lighting, Philips has successfully executed projects across Europe, North Africa and Asia. He is the founder of his practice, Inside Lighting Design, an international lighting design studio based in Berlin, Germany. In addition to his hands-on design work, Philip is also a passionate advocate for the lighting design profession and he actively contributes to the lighting community through articles, publications, lectures, teaching engagements and international seminars. Please join your hands together for Philip Raphael.

Ni hao. Thank you everyone for being here today. To not repeat the introduction, I would still like to discuss on creating lighting environments that can nurture or foster positive and memorable experiences, and this will come through in the presentation today. So we'll be discussing health and well-being in the workplace, and we need to start in the beginning. We need to understand what health and well-being truly means, and it is not just a question of our sort of medical, physical health, but it also looks into an individual's physical, mental and social well-being. So it really is a broader definition that considers physical health but also considers aspects such as mental and emotional state. It looks at our social relationships. It tries to understand our overall satisfaction with life, and that truly is a broad definition. And once you understand that, you then understand that you're not in a position to discuss health and well-being unless you're Pardon that, unless you're looking at the, also looking at the workplace. Now, work, we all do it, and it's fairly common knowledge that for the average Workforce or a person that is, they spend around a third of their waking time in the workplace, so that really is a substantial amount of time. So it becomes critical that we look at how we spend this time Now.

Health in the workplace has been studied for a very long time. Originally and that is really many decades ago we started looking at health and well-being from the perspective of productivity and, frankly, it was more about health rather than well-being. It was understood as how health affected our performance. How much light did we need to perform a certain task? Could we stay healthy while doing that task so that we can continue that task without getting tired? And even once we made advancements in science, such as the discovery of the third receptor, even then, despite understanding that this third receptor measured blue light, it helped moderate our circadian rhythm. Even with this perspective, we were still looking at it from a perspective of how could we increase alertness in order to improve our productivity? And, if we're truly honest, it wasn't really a concern of health and well-being to the point where, once we applied these technologies and methods, we started to discover yes, we are super alert, but we also started to become super aggressive, which ultimately led to toxic workplaces. Now, I'd say more recently, that is, a decade or two ago, we started to get a pretty good understanding of what we is, to what we can demand from lighting designers who are designing for the workplace and this page.

Although it's a single slide, I would say there's a lot of information here and it is in doing justice, and this list is all very good. We have maximizing daylight. This list is all very good. We have maximizing daylight, providing adequate lighting levels, flicker-free lighting.

But rather than looking at this as an expression of what is potentially best practice, I kind of see this as these are the requirements for a lighting designer to implement in their projects in order for their lighting design to not be too detrimental to our health. So, rather than, rather than a driver of well-being improvement and health, it is really just saying if you get this wrong, you will not be healthy. And I don't want to undermine this list. This list is good. This is all very important and we should not forget it. We do need to consider it, but we also need to recognize it for what it is very important and we should not forget it. We do need to consider it, but we also need to recognize it for what it is. Glare and flicker-free lighting isn't necessarily best practice. It's sort of a minimum standard and that should not be the objective of the designer. So I would say that this list is really a starting point and designers need to look at it and consider how we can do better.

So what happens when you don't consider this, when we don't meet those targets showed in the page before? Well, it can be quite disastrous. We have eye strain, we have tiredness, we sort of adopt bad postures to compensate for bad lighting, we get stress build-up which ultimately results in impaired mental health, and that all leads to reduced productivity and, and with that reduced productivity, we're not happy and we ultimately just stop going to work. We we we find increased absenteeism at work and the reason people stop going to work is because they don't feel well. They're essentially concluding that their health and well-being is being undermined by the workplace, and the consequences of poor lighting at the workplace or poor health and well-being at the workplace is well understood. We find these conclusions over and over again. This last study by McKinsey, made just last year, concluded that poor health and well-being resulted in it being four times more likely for people to want to leave their jobs, three times more likely to report low job satisfaction, three times more likely to report low job satisfaction, three times more likely to experience toxic workplace behavior, and so on, and these are substantial conclusions that we just can't ignore. So what we need to do, then, if we are to improve our lighting designs for health and well-being in the workplaces, we need to understand where the workplace is at and where it's heading to, and the workplace is definitely changing.

A hybrid office now is definitely a thing. It was already a thing a while back. We all heard of stories of people sort of working on holidays, work holidays, but then we had COVID, and COVID really was a slap in the face both for the staff and for the employers. Employers were literally forced to find a way to allow their staff to work from home, and once staff, once the workforce, got a taste of working from home, they did not want to let it go. They wanted to continue working at home, and that wasn't for mundane reasons. It wasn't because anybody wanted to work in their pajamas that they preferred to stay at home. It was for real, more down-to-earth reasons. We found that we wanted to save time on travel. We wanted to spend more time with our children, with our family, we wanted to self-manage our time. We wanted to create a better balance between personal life and our work. So I would say that COVID effectively supercharged the hybrid office, and now we understand that we can actually work from anywhere. So this sort of created an idea of a metaphysical workplace where, effectively, we're not stuck to our desks anymore. Anyone can literally work from anywhere, as long as they have a laptop and an internet connection.

And there's another change that has sort of appeared in the last few years I'd say five, six, at least to my awareness and it's a pretty important cultural shift. I'm not sure in the East, but this is a big thing in the West, where perhaps it's been pushed by Gen Z, I'm not sure, but whatever caused it, I think it's a good thing. We're now discovering that we want to live lives with greater meaning. We want to work at jobs that represent us, that represent our culture, that align with our core values. We ultimately want our jobs, our work, to be a part of our identity. So why should we return to the office?

Again, a study made last year in the US asking staff why they wanted to, why would they return to the office? And I guess you could summarize this list. And we want to work with our colleagues. We want to get to know our colleagues better, we want to learn from our peers, from more experienced colleagues, we want to have space to focus on work without noise, with the sounds of our children learning a musical instrument, etc. So if I were to sort of try and summarize this list of 14 topics, I would summarize it as we want social interaction, we want mentorship, we want spaces for deep concentration and we want spaces that allow for collaboration and teamwork.

And once we understand this, then we're at a place where we can start designing for health and well-being in the workplace. So I believe ultimately that lighting for health and well-being needs to be a sort of experienced supercharger. We need to provide lighting designs for the workplace that sort of offer a variety of lighting environments that can sort of nurture also a variety of experiences and fulfill our professional needs, our personal needs and our physical needs. And biophilic design was already presented here before. I won't go too much into it, but it is a sort of movement that runs in parallel to health and well-being and that is because there's a lot of alignment and it's effectively a movement that looks to bring in elements of nature into the workplace, because we recognize that we have a deep connection to the natural world and me biophilic design is important also because it created this sense of experiences in the workplace and in spaces in general.

Around 2012, I started working with Ming-Ju Narval, who are a green wall supplier and also plant supplier for companies, and they effectively they can do the lighting themselves. They know how to design and supply their lighting systems, but every so often they would have a sort of more complex project and bring me on board to help them with the design. And once I had a handful of projects with them completed and then sort of visited the spaces, I started to notice that the lighting was genuinely very refreshing. And you could argue that it is refreshing because plants are involved and this uplifts our spirits. But when I look at a lighting design, a lighting environment, I try to dissect it and sort of separate lighting from all other aspects and I also think that it was refreshing because of the lighting environment, that it was refreshing because of the lighting environment that it was creating.

To not go into too much detail on photosynthetic active radiation, on the lighting required for plant growth, typically you could sort of break it down in a nutshell by saying that you need a thousand lux average on the vertical surface. You might get a thousand, two, 1,300 peak and that is very bright for these workspaces. Many of the green walls are in breakout rooms with 200 lux average, and you're finding yourself then encountering this wall with 1,200 peak, and what happens is I found that it was refreshing because of the variety of lighting scenes that it created in a space, traveling the movement between a 200 lux space to a 1,000 lux space to a 300 lux space of the open office was very refreshing and sort of allowed the users to breathe. So this was really an eye-opener for the experience of lighting environments, experience of lighting environments. And ultimately then I decide oh, I understand that what we're trying to provide in the workplace, for a healthy workplace, is effectively providing flexible experiences and freedom of movement. Now, what is healthy is providing a variety of experience opportunities. Allow the workforce the flexibility to move freely from experience to experience, from space to space and from lighting environment to lighting environment. We're then allowing the workforce to self-regulate their personal lighting requirements and, for the most part, we tend to know what is healthy for us and what we need in that moment. Deep down, we know what our body needs and lighting designers, rather than being lighting dictators, we should be providing to our design a wide range of lighting environments that can fulfill all those needs, and by doing that and by doing that, we're really considering the user.

Now, if we sort of look at the previous three scenes, that are just examples. There are much more. We could say that each of those different needs require three different lighting environments. They all require different brightness composition, they all require different illumin composition, they all require different illuminance levels. They all define the space around us differently. And what we need to do is we need the lighting to respect and align with our personal and group well-being. We effectively need to allow the user to encounter all of these different lighting environments, spaces that are different. The freedom of movement is also allowing the workforce to have a sense of ownership, and a sense of ownership is important from the well-being perspective. And you can then take it a step further. You can look at it from the perspective of giving back to the user some returning manual controls to the user, some ownership of how the lighting scenes are controlled. And what I tend to do is, rather than prescribe what a scene is intended for, I simply design them to cater for different scenes, different functions, different lighting needs, and sort of put them in a hierarchy from brightest to dimmest, and then I allow the user to dim up and dim down and let them decide how the lighting scene is best used. And as these scenes shift, brightness also shifts, and we're effectively providing them different lighting experiences as they dim up and down.

Inclusivity is, I think, a tricky one because of how difficult it is to define it. It was mentioned before by Kevin that we all have different lighting needs. Some of us are more sensitive to light, others have impaired vision and perhaps need higher lighting levels, and we also typically design workplaces for extroverts that do well in larger groups. But we also need to be able to design for the introvert. If you recall, this safe and creative space that I showed in the previous slide is one example where, rather than having direct light, soft light is sort of more receptive or is received better by the introvert. And the point is, the workforce exists on a much wider spectrum of personalities and we need to somehow cater for that. And I believe the best way to be inclusive is to also provide a fairly wide range of lighting environments in our projects and allow for freedom of movement between them.

Now, multi-sensory is potentially complicated. I've presented it a few times and I sort of come to learn that perhaps such a radical color scheme is not suitable for all company cultures. But even when the culture is, say, more conservative, I still believe there's space for multi-sensory design. To give a simple example, if we were to say, provide an accent on a texture wall or simply focus our lighting on the architectural form and space, we're effectively providing a lighting design that is, say, more tactile and more enriching, and that experience is in itself very positive for our well-being. Cultural community is also very important and I think the thing to consider here is healthy communities don't tend to emerge in high-octane environments.

Now, for a while we've understood that the breakout space is important and sort of I'm promoting that even further here.

But what I'm actually also promoting or trying to emphasize is, I think the division between breakout space and work is starting to blur, and it is good that it blurs further and effectively we need to allow communities to emerge on the spectrum between breakout and work, rather than have these sort of very rigid divisions with different groups.

So to conclude and a lot of what was presented was sort of on the run to stay with time but effectively we somehow need to be self-critical to understand that when we're designing lighting for interior spaces.

Designing for health and well-being is, to an extent, also an attempt to reduce the disruptive effects that artificial light has on our body's natural rhythms, and I believe that in order to do that, what we need to provide is flexible lighting environments, more variation in lighting levels, more variation in brightness composition, more variation in sort of luminance levels, and then allow the person to move freely within those spaces.

Allow the person to move freely within those spaces and although it's you know sort of if we recall this very summarized list I presented at the beginning of the presentation, everything on that list is very, very important and it's based on science and we need to understand the science behind all of these criteria. But we also need to understand that the science is also very narrow in what it is looking at and that you actually need to come in with a design perspective to have a sort of more holistic approach, to look at the bigger picture and be more understanding on the variety of needs that a workplace may have. So, yes, the science is correct, but then a designer needs to come in and sort of take it a step further and once we do that, we are then truly designing for the health and well-being of the workforce. Thank you very much. Thank you, philip.