Part Two of a Three-Part Follow-up to the 25 Most Influential People in Lighting
Presented by EdisonReport and Pompeo Group
Controls that need a specialist on site to commission. Submittals that run hundreds of pages. A shared language built on physics, replaced by competing protocols. These complications may feel routine today, but some of lighting’s most influential voices say the industry has made its own work harder than it needs to be.
Last week, the honorees of the 25 Most Influential People in Lighting—2025 considered what future generations might question about our industry. This week, they look at the present.
EdisonReport and Pompeo Group collaborated on the 25 Most Influential People in Lighting—2025, an initiative conceived by Paul Pompeo, President of Pompeo Group, recognizing lighting professionals who have made significant contributions to our industry. Pompeo invited the honorees to participate in a three-part follow-up series, and eighteen of the original 25 responded to this question.
The LIGHTING25 honorees were selected by an independent committee consisting of three highly respected lighting professionals: Charles Stone, Nancy Stathes, and Jean Jacques.
This second installment asks:
“What is one aspect of modern lighting practice that has become more complicated than it needs to be?”
The 18 responses below point to controls, LED, project delivery, lighting criteria, and the way the industry divides its own disciplines.
Several contributors describe complexity that sits around the light rather than in it. Their concern is that each added layer makes lighting harder to specify, buy, install, and use.
Why Have Controls Become So Hard to Get Right?
Controls drew more responses than any other topic. Seven of the eighteen contributors named controls or smart lighting, citing commissioning, documentation, interoperability, pricing, and everyday usability.
Jeff Parker
CEO, Luminii
Lighting has quietly gotten more complicated at nearly every step. Not because the work demands it, but because each part of the process has grown its own layer. Controls that need a specialist on site to commission. Specifications that run pages deep to approve a single fixture. A path from design intent to installation where something can be lost at every handoff. None of it makes the light itself any better!
Randy Burkett, FIALD, FIES, LC
Principal, Reed Burkett Lighting Design
Lighting controls! Many clients and end-users simply do not need the level of sophistication found in many modern control systems. They find them expensive, overly complex, and frequently confusing. Less can be more and a better fit for many clients.
Ruskin Hartley
CEO, DarkSky International
Lighting controls. They’re the tool that could make responsible lighting automatic, but we’ve made them so complex that ordinary people give up! “Smart” should feel as simple as a switch.
Lee Brandt, IALD, MIES, CLD, LC
Senior Principal, HLB Lighting Design
Specifying and documenting controls has become more complicated than necessary. Energy codes now require networked systems. In the digital world, it should be a seamless process resulting in a reliable system operators know how to use.
Christina “Tina” Halfpenny
Executive Director and CEO, DesignLights Consortium
Networked lighting controls are still so complex with competing protocols, proprietary systems, and poor interoperability that they drive up costs and create confusion! Pricing adds further complication for bundling hardware and software without transparency. Simplifying standards and pricing clarity would make adoption easier.
Naomi Miller
Lighting Scientist Emerita, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
The specification, installation, commissioning and predictable and consistent performance of controls over time.
Acharawan Chutarat, PhD
Lecturer, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi
Smart lighting that does not respond to or understand human behavior.
These responses place the problem at every stage: specifying, documenting, commissioning, pricing, and daily use. Randy and Ruskin both argue for simplicity, whether for clients who do not need the sophistication or for ordinary people who should be able to use these systems. The common thread is a gap between what controls can do and what the people who buy and operate them can confidently manage.
Did the Shift to LED Take Something Away?
Three contributors trace today’s complexity to the move from legacy sources to LED, and to what was lost along the way: a shared language, a manageable specification, and the ability to repair.
Christopher Knowlton, MBA, CAE
CEO, International Association of Lighting Designers
Tungsten gave us something we have largely lost—a shared language. Resistance, heat, brightness, and the warm drift of color as you dimmed were concepts any school student understood intuitively! When the industry moved to solid state, what had been a common standard between competitors became a commercial battleground, and a fragmented ecosystem of components and protocols replaced the physics that had once done the work quietly and universally. I’m confident that the same pursuit of greater efficiency that created the complexity will also, in time, be what resolves it.
Sharon Stammers
Co-founder, Light Collective
LED! The complexity for specifying the right type of LED for its purpose makes it impossible for a non-lighting expert to pick correctly.
Martin Lupton
Co-founder, Light Collective
I think it’s changing with the advent of the circular economy, but when LED became the standard solution for everything we lost the ability to easily replace components and particularly the light source. They might last a long time but when they do fail, in many cases, the whole luminaire is deemed to have failed. It’s happened in many other areas of life too and we have become a society who replace rather than repair.
Christopher looks back to a time when physics set the common terms, and he expects the drive for efficiency to eventually resolve the complexity it created. Sharon describes what that complexity costs today: LED selection that non-experts cannot get right. Martin adds the consequence when a source fails and cannot be replaced. His concern echoes last week’s responses about disposable luminaires.
How Much Precision Does Lighting Really Need?
Three contributors question the complexity of the requirements themselves: how much light a project calls for, how precisely light should be measured, and how energy compliance is calculated.
Amy Oliver, CPM, FRAS
Public Affairs Officer and Light Pollution Scientist, Smithsonian
Lighting a project to the levels actually needed. People have become so accustomed to “lighting up the night” that designers are being asked to design for edge use cases instead of practicable need…on every project!
Mariana Figueiro, PhD
Professor, Department of Population Health Science and Policy, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Circadian lighting. Photopic lux at the eye will do for white light sources. Circadian system needs bright days, dim evenings and dark nights. One can get more precise, but precision can compromise utility.
Colleen Harper, MPA, CAE
CEO and Executive Director, Illuminating Engineering Society
Energy savings has grown too complex. Allocating carbon-based energy budgets by building type, location, and size – while still requiring lighting/HVAC standards – would simplify compliance and equitably reward efficiency and penalize excess usage.
Each response asks whether added detail improves the outcome. Amy wants design to return to practicable need. Mariana cautions that greater precision can reduce usefulness. Colleen proposes a simpler framework for rewarding efficiency.
Where Does the Project Process Lose Time?
Four contributors looked past the product to the process of coordinating, buying, and delivering a project.
Chip Israel, FIALD, FIES, LEED AP, LC
Founder and CEO, Lighting Design Alliance, a Salas O’Brien Company
Revit! The continual updating and posting of the project really means that the project is never coordinated. In the old days, the architect thought out the design, and drew the walls. On a sheet of vellum or mylar, the walls were sent to the interior designer, who added furniture and ceilings. On the same sheets the lighting designer added the lighting, and then the electrical engineer added the circuiting—everything was coordinated! Now every slight change creates a domino effect. Instead of saving time, Revit and weekly design meetings are now evaporating fees, so there is no time left for design or creativity.
Andrea Hartranft, FIALD
Principal, Hartranft Lighting Studios
Navigating the post design process. Lighting budgets are unicorns—value engineering is the norm; pricing is a moving target without pricing transparency and with multiple markups. Submittals are hundreds of pages long, eating up fee and often requiring double checks when approved products are resubmitted along with updated products.
John Palk
President and CEO, SESCO Lighting
While there are various aspects of our industry that are complicated, to me the visibility to a client’s order across multiple manufacturers is particularly complicated. Solving order visibility through the lighting and controls channel across multiple ERPs is being worked on by a few vendors. This effort can help resolve some of the onsite logistics and coordination issues we see today.
Leela Shanker
Sustainability Director, Design Lab, WAP Sustainability
Legal, financial and risk structures that inhibit the pace and scale of innovation? But I chose to work with light—I am probably drawn to complexity and uncertainty [laughs]!
Chip and Andrea describe a shared cost: fees absorbed by coordination and submittals instead of design. John identifies a logistics gap in tracking orders across manufacturers, and notes that a few vendors are working on it. Leela points to legal, financial, and risk structures that slow innovation, though she admits with a laugh that she is drawn to complexity herself. Last week, Lauren Dandridge anticipated a related frustration, predicting that designers will one day laugh at how complicated it is to purchase lighting.
Are We Dividing What Should Be Whole?
The final response challenges the way the industry organizes itself.
Rogier van der Heide
Lighting Designer and Global Design Executive, Atelier Rogier van der Heide
We divide light into daylight, electric light, controls, façades, media and compliance—and then we wonder why the result lacks coherence?
Rogier’s question connects several earlier answers. Controls, components, compliance, and project phases each have their own specialists, standards, and processes. His response builds on last week’s, when he suggested future generations may treat light, material, space and time as one continuous act of design.
Paul’s second question asks the industry to look honestly at its own practices. Jeff Parker offered a measure for judging progress: “The best lighting solutions aren’t the most sophisticated, they’re the ones people can specify, commission, maintain, and use with confidence.” By that measure, the responses above read as a list of places to start.
Next week, the series concludes with Part Three: “If you could permanently change one thing about how lighting is valued, discussed, or understood by the broader world, what would it be?”