For our Leading Luminaries story, Barbara Eldredge and Derrick Mead interviewed eight of our top lighting designers. To create the article that appeared in our December issue, we pulled together all of their interviews and edited them into a group conversation. I think it represents a kind of state-of-the-union for the discipline. The following is an edited version of Eldredge’s lively conversation with Hervé Descottes, the founder of L’Observatoire International. –Martin C. Pedersen

About five years ago, we identified day lighting as the next big thing in the field. So what’ today’s next big thing?

It’s LESS. (laughs)

Less?

Less is definitely a lot more.

What do you mean?

Less color, less uniformity. Be more customized. It’s about precision. I think lighting hasn’t been very precise. It’s been a lot about quantity and light level and making lots of surfaces of light and using the technology at the maximum of the extravagance of the technology.

So it’s about subtlety and form?

Yes. And it’s about time! It’s about time the lighting designer gets the place they deserve.

Do you think that lighting designers have been under-acclaimed?

No. Over-acclaimed.

You think so?

Absolutely. I think every lighting designer thinks they are much more important than they are. Many lighting designers think they’re the architects. I think its good with this recession that everyone is little bit more appropriate in their roles. Design is a team sport. Everybody has an important role. And I think for a long time lighting designers got so excited by this technology construct that they give themselves a little bit more importance than they really were in the course of the project. Lighting is important, but so is subtlety, refinement , and respect for the architecture . Thinking that we’re artists when we’re only lighting designers is not important.

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Last week on ABC’s Nightline, Bill Weir, the host of the segment “This Could Be Big,” waved our October issue on national television. The segment was on QR codes, and our cover had a big one on it. Weir’s question was, “Will this get bigger, or will it end up on the dust heap of technology?”

Our technology issue was all about how digital tools are shaking up the design profession, from architects learning code to using software for participatory design. Putting a QR code on each of those stories was a no-brainer—they add a multimedia layer of information to the page.  But the QR code on our cover was really the masterstroke—it’s a portal to Metropolis’s first digital cover.  When our art director Dungjai Pungauthaikan called the designer Peter Alfano to create the content that lies beneath that huge pixelated box, she said “Peter, this is the cover you’ve been waiting for.” We will say no more, except that once you’ve watched Weir’s segment below, we suggest you get hold of our October issue, and use a smartphone on it. (Or click here)

The “boxes of squiggly lines” are not quite as easy as they are made out to be, as our art department discovered in implementing them. They had to take into account various video formats, incompatible web browsers, and different smartphones. But they stuck it out. Because until Weir’s fancy trick with the champagne bottle becomes generally available, the QR code is very far from the dust heap—it is still our easiest link from the printed word to the digital world.

Read our technology issue here, including the story about QR codes integrated into clothing.

The great systems theorist Herbert Simon once gave a very concise definition of design: it was, he said, the “transformation from existing states to preferred ones”. This elegant little phrase packs a punch. For who is doing the preferring—the designer? the artist? the corporate moneymaker? No, the users. Which users, however, and how do we identify them? And how do we know what they prefer? How do we know what the existing state is? How do we know how to get from existing to preferred—what tools and methods can we use? And how can we evaluate that process and correctly re-adapt it as we need to?

This idea of design—as “transformation” using an adaptive process—is very much at the heart of the design theorist Christopher Alexander’s work. Through that adaptive process, we generate a form that achieves our “preferred” state. But at each step of this transformation, Alexander says, we are dealing with a whole system—not an assembly of bits. This turns out to be a crucial point for leading design technologists.

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The words “living” and “technology” do not often occur in the same sentence. We think of technology as something mechanical, inert, dead — very different from life, and even dangerous to living systems. And yet the word “technology” simply means “the knowledge of making” — that is, how to create structures in the world that help us do the things that we want and need to do to thrive as human beings.

Living organisms do very similar kinds of things: a Nautilus makes its shell, a colony of termites makes its mound, a cell makes its twin — and ultimately, through a compounding process, this kind of duplication, combined with gradual differentiation, makes complex organisms. (We will come back to the bit about differentiation.) In a real sense, we call this the “technology of life.”

Essential qualities generated by a technology of life are best discovered in small human creations: not decorative, not superficial, not fashionable, but so honest as to touch the core of living geometry.  Photo: Alexia Salingaros

The insights we are gaining about these processes are opening the door to a new chapter in design — an era of “bio-design”, “biophilia”, and “biomimicry”. It’s an exciting promise, particularly in an era when our old technologies seem to be failing us. The crude industrial processes that powered our world for a century or more leave us with depletion, fragmentation, and decay. Living systems can show us the way to recover and sustain the damaged systems upon which life depends.

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Chances are, you have heard of Christopher Alexander because of his most famous book on architecture, A Pattern Language. What you may not know is that Alexander’s work has spawned a remarkable revolution in technology, producing a set of innovations ranging from Wikipedia to The Sims. If you have an iPhone, you may be surprised to know that you have Alexander’s technology in your pocket. The software that runs the apps is built on a pattern language programming system.

How did an architect come to have such influence in the world of software — and as it turns out, a lot of other fields? (To name a few: biology, ecology, organization theory, business management, and manufacturing.) It’s a fascinating story — and it might just have something to say about the state of architecture today, and where it might be headed.

Though overshadowed by his written work, Alexander’s built work has been prodigious, with some 300 buildings around the world.  Above, a title image from a 2009 exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

Among architects, Alexander is often thought of as a kind of trendy architectural mystic. But in fact his career spans half a century, with work that is almost universally acknowledged as landmark theory on fundamental topics of design and technology. His first book, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, was widely hailed at the time; a typical review by Industrial Design magazine described it as “one of the most important contemporary books about the art of design, what it is, and how to go about it.” And from the very beginning, Alexander’s work has always been concerned with the fundamental processes of technological creation.

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Portable Spot Cleaner, designed by Adrian Mankovecky, Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava, Slovakia

If the Electrolux Design Lab competition were given charge of the future of our home appliances, all our gadgets would be monochrome, have oversize back-lit interfaces, and be either rounded or flexible. Since its inception in 2003, the competition has been asking industrial design students to imagine the future of home appliances, offering 5,000 Euros and a six-month stint at an Electrolux design center to the winner.  Each year’s theme is different, but the finalists always have a remarkable family resemblance. And they always manage to work past the fact that domestic appliances are energy guzzlers by suggesting some as-yet-unproven battery technology – sugar crystal batteries are a hot favorite this year, perhaps because they were specified in last year’s winning entry.

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A criticism frequently heard at recent furniture expos, from Milan to New York, was the absence of real product innovation. The bad economy has something to do with this shortage: During the past few years many manufacturers have used restraint, showing few new products, trotting out previous years’ introductions.

Still, there were a few surprises. One of them was the first-ever presence of Minnesota-based 3M, sandwiched in between bathroom faucets and textile stands at ICFF in a shiny, large-scale booth that seemed to say little more than, “We’re here!”. A Midwestern approach to attention-grabbing?  At closer inspection I found one of the most interesting offerings, no larger than an iPad: a new way to light up a building using sunlight – sans skylights or photovoltaic transfer.

“Sunlight Delivery System,” 3M’s daylighting solution, uses one of the company’s noteworthy inventions, a highly reflective film, familiar to users of LCD screens and smart phones. This luminous film brings sunlight inside a building through galvanized steel ducts connected to a rooftop catchall. Read more…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the average American is finding his or her relationship to health and wellness a bit… well… on the rocks. In a time of decreased fitness, increased processed foods, and a general lack of self awareness, most of us can’t figure out how to repair this broken relationship, though we really want to. A classic case of “it’s not you, it’s me.” Who’d have thought that the semester of health classes in high school wouldn’t give us the answers we’d need 5, 10, 20 or even 50 years later?

Enter Kaiser Permanente’s interactive Center for Total Health—the therapist you’ve been looking for, that is, if you’re in the Washington D.C. area. The new center was created to begin the discussion on national health as well as act as a meet-and-greet between patients and new medical innovations.

That tablet your doctor is carrying instead of her standard clipboard? It’s probably the new Blackberry Playbook which is being used to look up your medical chart or scan the barcode of the prescription you’ll be picking up in an hour. Having trouble remembering when to take how much of that particular medicine? The Philips Medication Dispensing Service will dispense, in your home, the correct medication at the right dosage at the right time. Or even if you’re in perfect health, you may be intrigued by GE Health’s Vscan ultrasound, which looks like a sleek device from the iPod family, but is capable of allowing sonographers to take their services to rural areas where such technologies aren’t yet available. In the realistic future, we may not be androids, but we sure are using them to our advantage. Read more…

The curtain-wall is perhaps the defining innovation of twentieth century architecture. Since the heyday of high modernism, a search for new building forms has usually meant grappling with a glass and steel grid. But as the demands on architecture have changed, in terms of energy performance and sustainable materials, we’ve had to completely rethink the role of a building’s skin.  Earlier this year, the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) issued an open call for innovative designs of curtain-wall systems. Six of the entries they received were selected to form the “Innovate” section of the exhibition Innovate: Integrate at New York’s Center for Architecture (CFA.) Read more…

There is a new naval battle being fought off the coast of Britain, but not of the kind that Admiral Nelson would recognize. The ocean is turning out to be the next frontier for renewable energy, and Britain leads the world in off-shore wind energy generation – it has already installed 330 wind turbines on its seas. Now several engineering firms are vying with each other to develop giant wind turbines for Britain, with capacities in excess of 10MW – double the size and power of any existing turbines.

Two Norwegian firms are currently in the lead, both offering mammoth windmills that “float” in areas where the sea is too deep to lay foundations. Read more…