Why This Lighting Designer Is Giving Away All His Secrets — So Anyone Can Light a Home Like a Pro

Summary

LytePod Podcast Summary — June 23, 2026
Episode Title: Why This Lighting Designer Is Giving Away All His Secrets — So Anyone Can Light a Home Like a Pro
Host: Lytei
Guest: David Warfel

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Episode Overview

This episode of LytePod centers on lighting designer David Warfel’s unconventional philosophy: freely sharing his knowledge and process so that anyone, not just professionals, can improve their home lighting. David discusses why an open, educator’s mindset isn’t just altruistic but can actually fuel business growth, debunks the mystique around lighting design, and explores the essential human questions at the heart of design. The conversation touches on industry challenges, the limits of expertise, and the possibility (and necessity) of scaling good lighting practice to serve more people.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Lighting as Education and Problem-Solving

• Lighting design is inherently educational. David believes everyone in the lighting profession, from sales to manufacturing, must act as an educator due to general public unawareness (02:21).
• David’s career has evolved from delivering knowledge (“hundreds of blog posts later, I talk about light today very differently than I talked about light 10 years ago…” [03:55]).
• Quote:

  “If you're in lighting, you're in education. You don't get a choice because so much of the world doesn't know anything about what we do.” — David [02:21]

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2. Connecting with Clients: Analogies and Empathy

• David emphasizes analogies; for clients, technical details are abstract but comparing lighting budgets to familiar appliances (e.g., kitchen stoves) helps clients feel in control and informed (06:36).
• He avoids jargon, focuses on small, digestible pieces of information, and uses honesty to foster trust (08:13).
• Quote:

  “If I can't explain it to a client… in a way that they can quickly pick up an answer, then I have failed.” — David [08:13]

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3. The Process: Repeatable, Adaptable, Human-Centric

• David’s firm breaks down complex decisions into bite-sized conversations across several meetings, using educational graphics and analogies as stepping stones (10:07).
• Every project is fundamentally different—defined by the uniqueness of the people involved—but the process remains structured (12:03).

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4. The Value of Education Over Sales

• Education is almost an anti-sales strategy: “I don't like selling. I like educating and letting them make the decision. And that apparently turns out to be somewhat decent selling.” [15:23]
• Tailoring to client interest—technical, creative, or simple—is crucial; over-educating can be as problematic as under-educating (15:23).

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5. Scaling Lighting Knowledge: The Limits and Possibilities

• Dilemma: Sharing knowledge risks losing competitive advantage, yet hoarding it stunts business and industry growth (25:11, 45:36).
• David draws a distinction between consumer knowledge (“easy to scale, helps them make a decision”) and practitioner expertise (apprenticeship, much harder to scale)—the 80/20 rule applies (28:19).
• He critiques the insular, protectionist tendencies of the elite “guild” of lighting designers but believes wider access benefits everyone (25:11, 26:31).
• Quote:

  “In the residential market, lighting is consistently getting worse. The biggest problems in the lighting industry were created by the lighting industry.” — David [00:31, 43:08]

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6. The Five Human Essentials of Residential Lighting

David’s core outcome-driven framework:

1. Wake gently
2. Move with energy
3. Think brilliantly
4. Relax easily
5. Rest deeply
   (41:15)

• Quote:

  “You want to wake gently. You want to move with energy. You want to think brilliantly. ... You want to relax easily. ... And you want to rest deeply.” — David [41:15]

• David believes anyone can understand and value these if they're framed in familiar, emotional terms, not technical ones (41:34).

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7. Industry Fragmentation & the Need for Transparency

• Lighting design is unregulated and lacks clear distinctions between levels of expertise, to the detriment of both clients and professionals (35:11).
• David proposes an open system of tiers or designations so that clients know what they’re getting, and “elite” designers can coexist with new entrants (37:24, 39:59).

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8. Why Giving Away Secrets Isn’t Self-Destructive

• Initially, David feared sharing his firm’s intellectual property; now, experience shows the business always grows when they share (45:36—48:33).
• He’s building scalable, accessible training platforms—his “apprenticeship for hundreds or thousands.”

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9. Long-term Vision — Making Lighting Designers Irrelevant?

• The “ultimate success” is a world where great lighting is standard and specialist designers are unnecessary (“If we can become irrelevant, the only reason we become irrelevant is because millions of homes have great lighting in them…” [48:47])
• Warns that if the profession doesn’t open up, a large tech player (like Apple did with watches) will enter and disrupt the market (48:47–51:45).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On process and honesty:

  “I’m not trying to sell anybody something. I’m saying, here are the options. You choose. I don’t care. I don’t live with you, I’m not spending your wallet.” — David [08:13]

• On industry responsibility:

  “The biggest problems in the lighting industry were created by the lighting industry. So the only people who are going to solve them are us.” — David [43:08]

• On how he'd teach lighting if he had only one way:

  "If I could wave a magic wand, I'd take them all outside, we'd watch a beautiful sunset, and I'd say, there you go. Do it inside. Done." — David [54:21]

• On what makes him feel most alive:

  “I feel most alive doing what I do when I am sharing the amazing gift of light with other people.” — David [54:47]

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Key Timestamps

• 02:21 — “If you’re in lighting, you’re in education…”: Lighting as an inherently educational field
• 06:36 — Use of analogies and familiar categories to explain lighting decisions
• 10:07 — Breaking the process into manageable conversations; using repeatable frameworks
• 15:23 — Leaning into education as a business and sales strategy
• 25:11 — The industry’s knowledge “fence” and exclusionary practices
• 28:19 — Why “good enough” design is still a vast improvement and can be scaled
• 41:15 — The five human outcomes of good residential lighting
• 45:36–48:33 — David’s reflections on sharing IP and the paradox of growth versus secrecy
• 48:47 — Vision of an industry so effective and open that designers become obsolete

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Episode Takeaways

• Education over hard-sell: Empowering clients with the right metaphors and just enough information is more effective than technical overwhelm.
• Process, not just talent: Scalable, repeatable methods—grounded in empathy—can raise the baseline of home lighting for everyone.
• Industry reform needed: Lighting design must become more transparent and accessible or risk being disrupted by powerful outsiders.
• Giving away ‘secrets’ builds, not weakens: Time and again, sharing knowledge has propelled David’s business and the industry.
• Human experience is universal: Despite every project’s differences, what people want from light is fundamentally the same—a fact to build education and process around.

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Summary by LytePod Summarizer: For those who haven’t listened, this episode is a must for anyone interested in how design, education, humility, and business growth can harmonize in the creative world—and how “giving away secrets” may, in fact, be the best design move of all.

Transcript

[A]

If you're in lighting, you're in education,

[B]

you have 15 people who work for you. You guys are doing over 100 homes a year. You've created a process around this.

[A]

At its core, design simply is informed problem solving or educated problem solving or experienced problem solving.

[B]

David Warfel has given away all of his secrets to grow his business as a professional designer. So I had to dive in and learn more about why it's working.

[A]

The good news is that in the residential market, lighting is consistently getting worse. The biggest problems in the lighting industry were created by the lighting industry. I like educating and letting them make the decision. And that apparently turns out to be somewhat decent selling. Am I nervous about it? I'm nervous about it because there's a whole lot of IP in our next offering. And could it put us out of business? Hypothetically speaking, yes, it could put us out of business. When I share, the business grows and when I keep, the business plateaus. But there is a part of me that thinks the ultimate success of the lighting industry is when lighting designers are no longer needed.

[B]

Foreign project deserves lighting that feels intentional, not like an afterthought you settled for under deadline pressure. That's why Lucetta CI engineered a linear lighting portfolio that integrates seamlessly with control systems. You already spec ships from a ready inventory in Reno and arrives when you actually need it. Residential, commercial and custom. Their team builds solutions around integrators, navigation, not the other way around. Lucetta CI is custom integration made easy. Check them [e-mail] you teach people all the time. It's a business strategy for you. It's an opportunity to make connections. Lighting education is a is a core piece of what you've always done. Where do you see what you're doing working where other people don't quite understand what the value of lighting education is.

[A]

One of my former employees told me that if you're in lighting, you're in education. You don't get a choice because so much of the world doesn't know anything about what we do. If you are going to be successful, you are going to educate. You can do a little bit of education or you can do a lot of education. You can do education poorly as an afterthought, or you can do it intentionally and with energy and effort and that will impact your business and how you move through the world. But in lighting, we don't get a choice to not be educators. If you're in sales, if you're a rep, if you're a manufacturer, we're always trying to educate the buyer or the dealer or the architect or whoever. It's just have we spent very much time and energy figuring out how we're going to educate, and if we haven't, we're going to butt our heads against people pretty frequently instead of enabling them to make the decisions we want them to make in the first place. So I think for me, I don't do anything better than other people. That's at least. I try not to think of myself that way. But I spend a lot of time figuring out how to talk about light. I started blogging. I've never been one to try and push the blog or get it out there. I think I have three subscribers, and that's only because my mom couldn't figure it out and subscribe twice. But it gave me a place where I had to figure out what to say and I had to ask the question. First I had to find the right question. Then I had to figure out how to answer that question in a way that I hoped other people could understand. And so, hundreds of blog posts later, I talk about light today very differently than I talked about light 10 years ago when I was teaching at a university. So there's been a lot of evolution in my language of light, and it has opened a lot of doors for us.

[B]

What do you understand now about the way you teach and speak about it that you didn't 10 years ago?

[A]

All of our knowledge, all of our expertise, all of those product facts we can bring to light instantly. All of that is meaningless if we can't help homeowners understand what we're talking about. It's like, go ahead, get a degree, go to a conference, learn a bunch of stuff. It's meaningless if the person on the other side of the table who has usually zero lighting training and probably a fair amount of misinformation about lighting. All of our knowledge is meaningless if we can't connect to them. If we can't connect to them on their level and help them understand very quickly why they should pay attention or why they should let us do our craft. Nobody likes being beat over the head with facts. Nobody likes being scared into submission of, oh, I guess I'll pay for that light because I'm scared it won't do X or it will give me bad whatever Y. Everybody wants to feel good, so concentrate on the good stuff that light does.

[B]

You mentioned connecting with people. I want to talk more about what happens once you connect with them and sort of bring them along the journey of why the technicalities matter. But before we get into that, it. It's just connecting. So do you use analogies? I mean, you have this blog. You make cool illustrations. What have you found? Makes people go, oh, what's the aha moment of I should listen?

[A]

I spend a lot of time with analogies. If you ask my wife, she'll tell you I'm terrible at analogies. So my approach is, let's come up with a thousand of them and maybe one or two of them will be good. It's a little bit like digital photography. Don't flip through my phone. You'll only find six good photographs. But I think that everyone knows something. If you can translate what we know about lighting into that something that they know, then they're going to have that. Oh, I understand enough now that I can make a decision between A and B. So every time we put a budget slide in front of one of our clients, it has a stove on. It actually has four different stoves, four different kitchen stoves, four different brands of appliances. And we can say, here's budget range A, B, C and D. I don't show them a light fixture. That's meaningless to them. I show them something that they all at least understand the difference between a Kenmore and a Viking. They can see the difference. They know the difference. They know what kind of house they're building. They know their value, structure, and they can say, that's the one that's right for me. And I'm not talking about lighting. So I use analogies all the time.

[B]

Once you're comfortable with them, what tips, the scale for them to start asking you questions about lighting.

[A]

If I can't explain it to a client or a customer or a learner in a way that they can quickly pick up an answer, then I have failed. And a lot of times, I think in the design industry, when I was growing up in it, we were always looking at how the other people failed, how the architect failed to understand what I could do for their ceiling, how the interior designer failed to understand what I could do for their furnishings, how the client failed to understand. You know, we're always looking at who's our enemy. The builder. Oh, my goodness, the builder is a huge enemy. And I won't BS somebody. If I don't have an answer that I know they can understand, then I'm going to be honest and I'm going to say, you know, I don't know that. Personally, I would notice a difference between light fixture A and light fixture B that costs four times as much. But that's Just me. You might, if you're interested in A, B or C. And I think that honesty frees up the conversation to go in a more authentic way. So it's not. I'm never trying to sell anybody something. I'm saying, here are the options. You choose. I don't care. I don't live with you, I'm not spending your wallet. What I care about is that I put some good options in front of you and I give you enough information to make an informed decision. And that has to be very small, a very small bit of information.

[B]

Once they're informed and they make a brief decision, what does that enable you to do? At what point do you just get to go do your job?

[A]

Never. If you mean go off in the ether and just do all of our things and then come back and it's done. I think, I think there always has to be a connection with whoever's making the final decisions, in essence about what to spend. We're always engaged with them. But what we do to try and make it easy on ourselves is we take the big conversations and we break them into bite sized pieces and spread them over three or four meetings. So that instead of like doing a bunch of design in meeting one and then talking about fixtures and budget in meeting two, we're talking about both of those in meeting one and two and three and four. And being able to build a repeatable process has allowed us to be very strategic. We're going to take you to point A in the budget conversation here and then we're going to move you from point A to point B. B in the budget conversation in the next meeting. And we're going to use these graphics and these analogies and these educational tools to get you from point A to point B in meeting one and point, you know, B to C in meeting two and then meeting three. We've got more analogies and more things and we're like leaving a little bread crail trail, you know, breadcrumb trail from point A to point B. And we're just letting them find the way to the end and they end up in a place that's uniquely them. Like we don't trick them into anything, but we give them enough information, they can find their way to a place they're going to be happy.

[B]

You talk about how you get them comfortable and then there's a real conversation that never ends until it's done. Like it's, it's hard to predict that. Or is it not?

[A]

Oh, it's very hard. You know, we do 100, 130, 150 projects a year, and every single one of them is going to be different. We're showing each one of those client teams or each one of those clients the same budget analogies or the same design theory slides, but they're all going to end up someplace different because everybody is a unique person. And that makes it hard and also makes it kind of fun because you get to meet interesting people, you get to talk to interesting people, you get to figure out how to solve problems. And I think at its core, design simply is informed problem solving or educated problem solving or experienced problem solving. And you get to know the people, and if you understand what the real problem is, then it's easy to solve. Do we win every time? No, but we win a lot.

[B]

Do people ever walk in to your client meetings, you know, your office first conversation, and say, gosh, lighting's just been a problem, and I want you to solve it for me.

[A]

One out of 30. And that's a very scientific statistic. It's not. Most of our clients come to the very first meeting, which I would, off the record, call a pitch meeting. Not sure why they're talking to us. Somebody has told them that they think they should talk to us about lighting for their project. And most of the clients are like, well, okay, we've met 37 consultants at this point. What's one more? And they get on a call with us and they're like, okay, what do you got? What are you going to sell us? They're kind of primed for that. And we go through a conversation and say, here's what you can have, here's what you will have. Here's what we do. If this is of interest to you, let's talk. And if it's not of interest to you, it's nice meeting you. Like, we're not going to push, and we're not going to scare them into working with us. We're just going to say, here's what it looks like when it's all done, and it's just whatever got put on there to pass code, and here's what it's going to look like when it's done. And we've brought what we know to the table.

[B]

I mean, you guys obviously have to basically start from scratch every time. It's not the commercial world where a design team goes from project to project to project. Right. This is a very personal experience. But one can argue it's always, like you said, fun and a fresh new opportunity. I would say that you're building believers, right? You're building an opportunity to have one homeowner after the next believe in investing in good lighting. And you're doing that through education. It seems like a shoe in and I feel like it's, it's probably the most underrated approach to lighting design in the market today. Do you agree?

[A]

Education being that underrated approach, I think it's a missed opportunity for people who aren't doing it. What do I want to do? I want to help people and people want help, they want to be helped. And education is a way that we do that. And so if we can do it well, they're going to let us help them. So is it a good sales strategy? I'm not a sales expert. That's not my thing. And I think that may be why I leaned into education is that I don't like selling. I like educating and letting them make the decision and that apparently turns out to be somewhat decent selling. So is it a missed opportunity? Yes. I think it's also very easy to mess it up. I think you can also over educate most education of a technical nature or a design aesthetic nature is going to turn off half the room. If you're hyper technical, you'll turn off the creative free spirits and if you're hyper creative, you'll turn off the technical. In the same way that we sprinkle breadcrumbs to allow them to go through the design process, we also have, you know, if we're going to follow that analogy, we have clearings in the woods and there's breadcrumbs going that way and there's breadcrumbs going that way. And we just say, hey, if you'd like to dig more into light and health, for example, we will be happy to go down that trail with you and we can geek out on that stuff together. But if not, here's another trail and if not, here's the fast way to the finish line. We give them options and then we let them choose. And so with some clients we geek out about light and health and other clients we show them enough that they understand we're making decisions based off of our hope for their well being. But we don't take them down that technical road.

[B]

How do you back yourself out of any situation while. While knowing you still gotta like come around again to you mentioned earlier, like you gotta stay engaged with them through the end of the process.

[A]

I wish I was better at that. I will say that when I was younger I, I just spoke more forcefully, I tried to say this is really important. Let me see if I can jazz it up a little bit. But as I've gotten older and as I've watched my business partner Mark and how he talks, I realized that it's okay to say to a client, I kind of get the sense that either I'm getting too technical or this isn't interesting to you. You here's another option and I put it out there in front of him. No client wants to talk about the difference between a beam angle and a field angle. Or I shouldn't say no client. 99% of clients do not want to talk about the things that we talk about after the phone call or the meeting is done. That's our inside talk versus our outside talk. So you have to read the room and that's tough. I think it's even tougher in a remote situation. And most of our client meetings are on zoom. You have to read the room, you have to understand where they are. And if you are losing them, just say, I feel like I'm losing you. And find out where they want to go.

[B]

Is there ever a moment where they get so excited because you've taught them so much? They start to come at you and engage. Do the tables ever turn? Do you see the light bulb go off where they're like, oh, I know enough to get dangerous and talk about it now

[A]

we do. And that's fun. And for every client, it's going to happen in a different place. We do digital sketching a lot. It's like a hand done version of a rendering. So it's not photorealistic, it's not ray tracing and all of that. It's literally us sketching on top of a snapshot of a 3D model. And that is a moment where many of the clients really come alive because we're showing them something in a simplified form so they can concentrate on the lighting. They're not getting distracted by the other stuff. And they're seeing it the way they're going to see it in the house from eye level instead of a plan with gradients on it. You know that show where the lights are going to be, which is.

[B]

That's useless to them.

[A]

It's useless to them. It looks cool, but it's useless. It's like giving a client a lighting calculation is useless to them. It looks really cool and technical. So we're really tempted to show it to them to kind of prove our work. But it's. They don't care.

[B]

You, you've proven value and now you're going to Help them make decisions. I would argue you do strongly through education in the entire process. You have 15 people who work for you. You guys are doing over 100 homes a year. You've. You've created a process around this, but you haven't done it overnight. Why is it so hard to take lighting education and so to speak, systemize it and scale it?

[A]

Are you talking about lighting education for people who are going to be outside of the profession, or lighting education for people who are trying to come into the profession or grow in the profession? Because I think they're too very different user groups and two very different approaches.

[B]

Now I want to hear about both. Let's start with people that are outside the profession, the client side.

[A]

I think it's tough because there aren't that many good examples to follow. For example, 10 years ago, I started developing a new language of light for residential. And I came up with the design philosophy I was going to use. And for several years I blogged on it, I wrote on it, we used it in all of our client presentations and all of our client meetings. And it was helpful, it was useful, it opened up conversations, it helped us educate them in a way that was more approachable. And I don't use any of that language anymore. None of it. And the reason for that is that we're still learning and growing. The industry is changing, the technology is changing, the science is changing. It slowed down a bit, but it's still changing. And what we understand about humans, we're not taught that in school. We don't ever really spend a lot of focused time figuring that out. So that means that over the past 10 years, I came up with something I was totally in love with, and I don't use any of it anymore. And yet you can follow the through line. It's all the same thing. What we use now is simply the latest iteration of the simplest way we have found to talk about the value of light, the benefit of light, the beauty of light, the power of light. We won't be done until we can say that in three words. And we're not there yet. So that means we continue to iterate. And I think everyone else needs to do that too. So it's tough. Why is it missed? It's missed because we haven't found the answer yet.

[B]

Is it hard to scale it because we don't know what we're saying?

[A]

I think scaling knowledge for a homeowner, that doesn't intimidate me. I think that's easy. I think scaling knowledge within the industry, people who want to grow, whether they want to grow design skills or they want to grow sales, whatever, that's tougher to scale because that knowledge has to include the whole thing. And a homeowner just needs to know enough to make a decision. Those of us in the industry, you want to go out and do a lighting design for a house and call yourself a lighting designer, you can do that tomorrow with zero training. You want to survive and thrive. You're going to learn a lot of hard lessons and you're going to get there eventually. That's hard to scale.

[B]

Let's talk about this. The scary nature of having a scale, adding knowledge within the industry, with custom home integrators, we'll call it a hundred consistently with a thousand, trying to make it happen every day. What's the scary part about them knowing enough to be dangerous, but not knowing at all?

[A]

I think we have a problem in the industry, at least in the residential lighting industry. I grew up in the commercial sector, but I left that about 10 years ago, so I can only talk with some knowledge about the residential sector these days. I think we have almost deliberately, but probably subconsciously restricted the knowledge to a very, very small group of people. And whether it was intentional or unintentional, we basically said, here is this amazing lighting knowledge. You can't have it, and we really don't want you to have it.

[B]

Who's we in this equation?

[A]

We is the design industry, in essence, to say, look, the only way you can get this knowledge, for example, is, is to hire me and pay me hourly to do this work for you. That is the only way you can get this information. And that means you have to spend a lot of money on me, because hourly design is not cheap. That means you have to be wealthy. So we have this fence around the knowledge and the access to good lighting that is a. That only allows a very small group of people in. And we said, the rest of you can't even be in our professional organization. Like, we're not going to allow you to be in that.

[B]

Is it good lighting or is it great lighting?

[A]

I think there is.

[B]

Or is it not bad lighting? Like, I do want to pick on it. Right. By far and large, anyone who spends their entire life dedicated to something becomes an expert. Just because you're not as good as LeBron, Kobe, or Michael in basketball doesn't mean you can't play in fifth grade and someone can't cheer for you and you can't not win. Here we go with our analogies, right? Like, that's not Great basketball. It's pee wee basketball, but somebody enjoys it, namely the people on the court.

[A]

A pivotal moment in my trajectory in the profession happened probably over a string of moments, but in essence, when I met my first integrator, a guy named Jonathan Wesco from South Bend, Indiana, I didn't know what an integrator was at that point, and I was doing lighting design for him occasionally. And at that time, what I really wanted to become was what I now call elite residential lighting designers. We know who they are. Their names are on their door, on the door of the firm. I had my name on the door of our firm. There's a handful of them. They do phenomenal work, over 40 years of experience. Great. And in essence, what this integrator told me was, you know, that's pretty awesome stuff, but there are a whole lot of people who don't want or can't afford that really awesome stuff. If you can find something that's better and a little bit more affordable and a little bit easier to scale, there is an unlimited marketplace. So I rebuilt the business, refocused the business, and of course, growth took off.

[B]

When you put the capability of designing and selling lighting in the hands of people who know enough, but not all of it, what happens? Why is it so hard to scale everything they need to know? Why do they run away from you?

[A]

One of the joys of getting older is that you start to become more comfortable in your own skin. And I'm now comfortable getting up on stage even, and saying, I'm not the best lighting designer in the world, nor will I ever be. What am I passionate about and what can I bring to the table? That's what I have to do. And it isn't design, it isn't becoming a great designer. It's making that design more accessible to other people. And we get pushback because we don't meet the level of standard of some of those elite lighting designers. We are possibly either ourselves putting out substandard lighting or training others to deliver substandard lighting. And that is absolutely necessary if we are going to help any quantity of people. The good news is that in the residential market, lighting is consistently getting worse. The standard is so low that I could give anyone eight hours of knowledge and they would make plenty of mistakes, but it would be better than what was going to be in that house otherwise. So if I can give someone 40 hours of training, they're going to do a fantastic job compared to what's there now. What do they have to get to become an elite lighting designer? 10 years of apprenticeship like that doesn't happen overnight. In some ways, it's like saying we can get 80% of the way there with 20% of the effort. Getting to 100% of the way there to elite lighting design is another 80% of effort. And that part is the part that's hard to scale because that's time. It's running into every single project on the job site at some point. It's figuring out solutions. It's learning from all kinds of different people. It's having to solve the problem with a builder who's friendly and a builder who's unfriendly. It's all of those things. And that is really tricky to scale. But the part that gets people to 80% or 70% or even 50%, it's all going to be significantly better than what's on the marketplace. That part's easy to skip.

[B]

If I go back to my sports analogy earlier, you pick any famous NBA basketball player. It's a game of repetition, right? The free throw line doesn't move. The court's in a different environment, but it doesn't move. I feel like the free throw line's always moving in your world. No, no, no.

[A]

How many ways can you light a bathroom? Infinite.

[B]

Yes, but, but, but where is that bathroom? Who's building that bathroom? What's the timeline? What's the budget?

[A]

It's never consistent.

[B]

I guess here's, here's where my brain is at. Like you can argue everything you just said is an argument for repetition. Creates the best opportunity and outcome. Can it really in a profession that is as that like sports have rules and courts and lines and there's that construction, I guess has codes. To your point, there is a certain amount of ways to light a bathroom or something like that. But like, isn't there always an unknown variable, no matter what you're doing from a process oriented space which could potentially make the scaling part impossible because you shoot a thousand free throws. But now the line's over there.

[A]

I'm not intimidated by it and I'm not intimidated by it because yes, there are differences with absolutely every single project. And thank goodness, because otherwise I wouldn't have a job. But light is fixed. It's so constant that it's the constant in Einstein's general theory of relativity equals MC squared. Like light, it's the one constant in that equation. And while every set of human eyes is different and unique, we all want the same thing. And in essence, the sunrise and sunset that happens outside every day, that's what we want every single one of us in every single house. Most of us don't know how to articulate that. We don't know how to execute it. We don't know how to make it easy or manageable for a human or whatever. We don't know how to do it. But that's all we want. It's simple. Execution is complicated, but the variable of a client, as long as they are human, I know what they really want, even if they don't. They want to wake up gently, they want to think brilliantly and move with energy. They want to relax easily, and they want to rest deeply. And you put those things in everybody's day, everyone's happy. So is every project different? Yes. If I could accomplish those things on every single project. No, they're not all different. They're all exactly the same.

[B]

So back to our industry of the small group of elite who know it all, with a tougher time to recruit, and a massive group of people who just want to get into it or are literally doing it or trying to do it, who barely know any of that. Why is that scary? Why is the scalability of the knowledge around those five things scary to you?

[A]

It's not scary to me. Unless you want to take that big group and turn them into elite lighting designers. That is intimidating because that is an apprenticeship profession, and apprenticeships do not scale. There is a master and an apprentice, always two of them. But it doesn't scare me to bring that group of thousands up to a higher level. I'm not afraid of that.

[B]

Is there. Is there a right barrier for that higher level? Do you feel like it's established?

[A]

No. And that is part of the problem is that the barrier is undefined. And so I would love it if there was a way to differentiate. You use sports. I wish there was an NBA of lighting design so I could label those people as NBA and I'm in the entertainment league. But they play a good game and they have a good time, and they. And you know, the audience practice, has a good time. Talented, yeah.

[B]

Competitive?

[A]

Yeah. At a different level, that's fine. But we don't. Lighting design as an unregulated profession means that an elite lighting designer calls themselves a lighting designer, and someone who's never done anything but sit through a class calls themselves a lighting designer, and the paying public has no idea how to tell the two apart. So if we had an NBA or a major league, I think that would maybe calm some of their fears, because I do think their fears are legitimate.

[B]

Well, they're Pissed off. Someone's. Someone's claiming they're as good as they are, and all you have to do is put them in the same room.

[A]

They have a right to be upset. We just need to find a way to solve the problem so that they can be what they are and the other people can be what they are. There's room for both. In fact, it's necessary to have both, because the elite lighting designers cannot help the 1.3 million new homes that'll be built this year, or the 5 million homes that will change hands, or the hundred million homes that people are already living in. That's just in the United States alone. The elite lighting design profession cannot scale to help more than a thousand or two of those homes in a given year. So if we're going to help more people, we have to have a huge body of people who do a pretty good job but are not elite lighting designers. It's absolutely critical if we're going to move light forward.

[B]

It just only matters that the person paying for it understands what they're paying for.

[A]

Yes, we have a guide now that has five different kinds of lighting design, five different flavors. But we have the whole thing mapped from what we now call product placement. If it is done by someone selling you a fixture, it's product placement. If it's done by a manufacturer or a rep agency, it's product placement. Product. It may have a lot of good solutions in it, but its primary motivation is product placement. If it's done by an architect, it's for permit. That's the reason it's done most of the time. They just don't have the time to learn that much about lighting. And then you've got basic lighting design through elite lighting design and several different flavors of that. If we could come up with a unified language for that as an industry and give everybody a designation and say, here's what you are, here's what you are, here's what you are. Then we could differentiate to the client, hey, we're in this group.

[B]

Do you think the lighting industry as a community can create that through a think tank or just. I mean, realistically, like, do they want to. Is there the time to. Or does something like a professional organization or nonprofit need to articulate and govern that?

[A]

Well, in the lighting profession, then you run into the problem of which professional organization, which nonprofit does that? Is it possible? Of course it's possible. Is it realistic? Not right now. There's so much fragmentation, I think, and little groups. I mean, as a commercial lighting designer in the first Half of my career, I had never heard of the American Lighting Association. I'd never even heard of them. Why? Because they live in a world that is primarily residential, primarily decorative, and primarily showroom. Like, that was their market. And we didn't deal with that on a commercial sector. We dealt with reps and manufacturers, a whole different group. So the IAS and the iald, we knew those organizations. I never even heard of that. And now, of course, I'm like, oh, of course I know who they are. How many organizations are there? There are a lot. Could we come together and create a designation? Yes. Are we going to. That's another question.

[B]

Is what we're talking about, like, unifying all? Does it really matter?

[A]

That's a really good. So something that just went through my head is, could I, as a pretty good lighting design company, but not an elite lighting design company, could I offer those elite lighting designers a short paragraph that says, here's how you tell your client you're different than us. Could I, in essence, extend myself and say, this is how you are better than we are? And if we could get a dozen people at the table who were willing to do that, who were willing to say, you know what? Here's how you're better than I am, and here's how I'm better than you are, what we're going to find out is that what they do is different than what we do, and what we do is different than what they do, and that there's room for all of us. And we could take away that fear, and we could take away the stigma, and we could take away the, you know, everybody getting uptight about, oh, my goodness, you know, they're ruining lighting design. No, we're not. We're expanding it.

[B]

You're expanding this opportunity of these five things to wake up softly, Gently. Gently. Walk me through them again. Sorry.

[A]

You want to wake gently.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You want to move with energy. You want to think brilliantly. Your brain has to work. You want to relax easily.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, you just want that relaxation. Relaxation to be easy. And you want to rest deeply.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You have those things, and you're in good shape.

[B]

What's the hardest one of those to sell, to communicate, and what's the easiest to a homeowner?

[A]

None of them are difficult. And maybe that's just because I've spent deliberate energy on each one of those. Sat down with an iPad and a blank slate and a pencil and said, how can I think about this? What could I do? Wake up gently. What are some analogies? I could Do. Are you the kind of person who likes to ease yourself into the pool or would you rather do a belly flop? Because an alarm clock in the morning is like a belly flop. It's like, whack, wake up. There's another way to do it. So if you spend time and energy, I don't think it's hard. But most of us are asking the wrong questions. We're asking the questions about CRI or whatever, beam angle, and those are important. But in communicating with others, in communicating with clients, how do they feel? That's what we want to know.

[B]

This question piece, I'm going to go back to my, my friends over here, the large group of people who are eager to get into lighting. I don't care what their motivation is for the sake of this question. It seems so obvious to just like go learn the, quote, technical details of it, especially if they come from a technical place in space. I would argue the entire integrator world comes from that space. But what you just said is, none of that matters if you don't know how to ask people questions about how they want to feel.

[A]

It's true. I run into a lot of people who seem to have a chip on their shoulder because people won't let them do what they're supposed to do. You know, they won't let them do their job. They won't let them specify the right fixture, they won't let them put the right layers of light in the space, they won't let them use the higher grade, you know, linear fixture, etc. And so there's this chip on the shoulder like that reflects badly on them, on those, whoever those other people are. We're always trying to shift the blame off of ourselves. And real change happens when we realize that the biggest problems in the lighting industry were created by the lighting industry. And so the only people who are going to solve them are us. And when we solve them, then people will not fight us so much, but it's on us to make that difference, not them. It's kind of freeing when you get to that point as well, when you realize that the biggest problem in lighting is the lighting industry and so we can solve it, and then we just figure out how to solve it as an industry and it goes away.

[B]

Yeah, capitalism gets in the way of that real fast. And I think I talked about it early in this conversation. I kind of think that's where it's at right now. I think there was so much opportunity to like move and innovate and change and create new products. And transition to LED and have technology be in lighting and now incorporated into lighting, now completely control lighting. But now it's all just kind of there. And if I can be honest, some of it works great, most of it works okay, and there's a decent amount that's still kind of doesn't work. Like, this industry isn't sitting around saying, wow, we're all making the same stuff. Who's the leader? Who can we prop up even more and let them grow so we can all benefit from it? As I say this out loud, it's manufacturers and in. In the sales channel that probably note notes that more. I would cite you. I would cite other people as designers who actually do the opposite. You do openly Share train Quote Give away your ip.

[A]

How's that going for you, giving away ip?

[B]

And maybe you want to define that before you answer the question.

[A]

So what makes us who we are is how we talk about light and how we move people through the design process. The tools we use, the analogies we use, the tricks, the slides. That's what makes us who we are. And the team of individuals who have learned that and learned to share that with others. And I think as the business grew, I started to get that fear of, wait a minute, now it's valuable. When it was just me in a studio above my garage, I could write something. It would go out on a blog, a couple of people would read it in other countries even. It was never going to take food off my table. It was never going to be a threat to me. As our business grew and stretched across the country, I started to get this fear of, well, that part I need to keep for myself, and that part I need to keep for myself, and that part I need to keep for myself, and that part I need to keep for myself. And so there was this hard line of, I'll train you in sort of lighting fundamentals. I'm not going to tell you how light can help you walk through a design process, because that's our core ip. And we got to a point about a year ago where Mark, my business partner, and I sat down and said, I think we have to change that. I think we have to stop hoarding some of that knowledge and we need to start sharing it. And so for the last year, we've been working quietly on what is that platform? How do we do that? How do we scale an apprenticeship for hundreds or thousands? And that's what we're launching now. And it's super exciting. I've never been more excited because it's Also forcing us to get better at what we do so that we can package it neatly for others and share it. And now am I nervous about it? I'm nervous about it because there's a whole lot of IP in our next offering. And could it put us out of business? Hypothetically speaking, yes, it could put us out of business sharing this much IP with others. But at every point in my career, when I share, the business grows and when I keep, the business plateaus so I'm ready to share.

[B]

Does the mentality of design shift? Do we accept more levels of it or do we stay small and say it's elite or go home?

[A]

Well, you know which direction I want to go. I think that elite will always exist. I think it will always exist. But there is a part of me that thinks the ultimate success of the lighting industry is when lighting designers are no longer needed. Like, if we can become irrelevant, the only reason we become irrelevant is because millions of homes have great lighting in them and everyone knows what to do to get great lighting or to get pretty good lighting, then we become irrelevant. That's not going to happen anytime soon. It's not going to happen in a fractured industry where we're so busy competing with each other about the SPECs of our 1 inch downlight versus their 1 inch downlight, that we never come together to give a solution that the homeowner can implement easily and control easily and all of those things. If we stay hyper competitive with each other, then we are just waiting for a big player to come in and say, I'll take that. And you think about the watch industry. And first Apple was like, let's just kill watches. Everybody will have a phone in their pocket. It's way more accurate. Let's just have that. And so for a number of years when I was teaching watches went away, no one was wearing a watch because they were just look at their phone if they wanted to know what time it was. And then eventually they were like, but we could make a watch. And so what do most people wear now? You know, they killed the watch industry and then they make a watch. Some player that has trillions in revenue or trillions in market capacity and billions in revenue could look at the lighting industry, could throw enough money at the lighting industry and could develop a solution that 20 years from now everybody has in their home. And we missed the boat because we had all the knowledge, we had all the technology, but we didn't play well with each other. So, yeah, could we be put out of business? I think we could absolutely be put out of business. I kind of hope that the big players don't pay any attention to us for a while, and they'd probably royally mess it up for five or 10 years. But eventually, if they wanted it bad enough, they could figure this out. What we do is really awesome. What we do has a lot of science and a lot of technology. But as the overplayed saying goes, this isn't rocket science. Not if we're trying to give homeowners a better experience. We can give homeowners a better experience by doing a little bit more lighting work on their homes. Somebody can figure out how to scale that, that's scalable.

[B]

If we don't leave asking the right questions, if we don't leave with the understanding behind all of our intent first, which is human emotion, we fail. It doesn't matter if you create a beautiful design, if it doesn't suit the needs of the emotional capacity of the human being in that environment, you lose.

[A]

We could lose. Yeah, I think we could lose.

[B]

We could get so caught up in

[A]

all this riff raff and that can be scary, but we could also win. And we could win in every way that anyone in this industry wants to win. We could win that way. We could win in terms of growing our businesses if that's what we want to do. We could win in terms of changing the way the construction industry works. We could win that. We could win if it's selling more fixtures, if that's what we want. All of that is possible. And that's what is really exciting about a gathering like this, is that all of that is possible. But it is equally possible that not much will happen. And the difference isn't what products are on the show floor, it's who shows up and what attitude do they bring when they walk through the door. This is still very much a human game. And if we all walked into that room and said, you know what, let's sit down and let's change the industry so that the people who aren't in the room look at us and go, dang, we totally missed out. That's possible. It's possible.

[B]

Here, I have two more questions for you. The first one is unfair, but I'm going to ask you to answer it anyways for the sake of the fact that everyone has to start somewhere. If you could only pick one way that you, David, would communicate how to educate people about lighting, what would it be?

[A]

If I had to pick one way to educate people about lighting, Concentrate on those four or five things. Focus all your energy on getting people to relax easily. Just pick. If I had to pick one, focus on that.

[B]

How. How would you teach them that, though? What would you do? What would your vehicle delivery mechanism be for it?

[A]

If I could wave a magic wand, I'd take them all outside, we'd watch a beautiful sunset, and I'd say, there you go. Do it inside. Done. I like to say that in the beginning, God created light. And we've been trying to copy her work ever since. We're not close yet. There's a lot of room to grow.

[B]

When do you feel most alive doing what you do?

[A]

I feel most alive doing what I do when I am sharing the amazing gift of light with other people. And I get so many different ways to do that. I can share the gift of light with homeowners and clients. I can share it with learners. I can share it with blog readers. So I like a lot of my job right now. Of course, I created it, so there's that. But I enjoy a lot of what I do because if I can help people with light, mission accomplished for me.

[B]

Thanks, David.

[A]

Sam. Keep going, dude. It's great being here.

[B]

Keep teaching people. I think it's great.

[A]

I'm not quitting.