One of the biggest challenges with working as lighting designers is the need to communicate our ideas to a client, architect and engineer. Light as a medium is invisible. You can’t see it, you can’t touch it, but what you do see is the result of light when it is reflected off a surface.

We hit two of the greatest interiors shows in two months, Maison et Objet in Paris and the Northern Light Fair in Stockholm, checking out some of the key trends for 2019 and beyond. One of the biggest take-aways we’ve seen at both fairs is the re-emergence of colours, prints and texture in lighting.

In her book ‘The Secret Lives of Colour’ the author Kasia St Clair expands upon the social roots, cultural understanding and history of a range of colours. Blue, being one of my favourite colours, gets special treatment; first listing the shades of the colour, she then uses a range of evocative descriptors to alert us to the wonder of this colour; Ultramarine, Cobalt, Indigo, Prussian Blue, Egyptian Blue, Woad, Electric Blue, Cerulean.

I’m currently in the throes of preparing course content for my Griffith College students for the new term starting next month. Looking at the material for my first lecture on lighting history, it is so impressive the explosion of lighting creativity at the end of the 19th Century, start of 20th. Electric lighting arrived on the scene with Thomas Edison’s light bulb in 1870. And was followed a myriad of new lighting technologies, and professions.