Gratitude

Gratitude encompasses appreciation and affirmation of gifts and benefits that have been received. As an active area of scientific inquiry, gratitude has been positively linked with sleep quality, empathy, physical health, and emotional well-being. Conscious expressions of gratitude have been shown to improve relationships, decrease depression, and improve happiness. I can’t help but observe that good lighting has been associated with many of these same outcomes. Just as it’s in our best interest to spend time in environments with high-quality lighting, it’s also in our best interest to be grateful.

If we step back from the mundane tasks of daily life, lighting professionals need not look hard to find reasons to be grateful. We have plentiful opportunities brought about by rapid advances in solid-state light generation and control, and the potential to improve health made possible by advances in photobiology. We can be further thankful that plateaus are not in sight.

Applied lighting takes input from disparate disciplines, each a part of an intertwined network. We all give and receive based on our respective roles. Lighting researchers receive and build upon past research results, and endeavor to advance professional practice with new knowledge. Lighting designers reveal architecture with judicious application and integration of lighting equipment. Luminaire designers create products that employ advanced optics and light sources. Physicists, chemists, and material scientists give us new light source technologies, built upon centuries of prior advancements. Today’s lighting would be impossible without yesterday’s successes, and are only realized because of interdependencies between professionals in allied fields.

Because light contributes to visibility, psychological well-being, physiological health, sleep quality, and energy use, lighting professionals advance not just lighting quality, but quality of life for those that work, live, and play in the built environment. Lighting is a public good, and the opportunity to collaborate with others to make an impact through lighting is reason to be grateful. Whatever your role—architect, contractor, distributor, engineer, interior designer, landscape architect, lighting designer, manufacturer, owner, representative, researcher—you give and receive and have the potential to make a difference.

That potential, however, is dependent upon cooperation. At their best, illuminating engineering and applied lighting are uniting disciplines, bringing together diverse fields, scholars, and practitioners with innovations that capitalize on the power of light and lighting. But applied lighting can also be fragmented, where people work in their respective silos and miss connections that could lead to more rapid technological advancements and better solutions. Gratitude can be the conduit that helps us to see connections, appreciate differences, and envision possibilities to collaborate across disciplines and imagined boundaries.

At root, gratitude, like advancement, is social—both made possible only through interacting with others. I invite you to reach outside your immediate circle and find reasons to appreciate and work with others that enable rewarding careers in lighting.