What is Ambient Lighting Design
Adding Special Effects To Your Interiors
About Ambient Lighting Design
Ambient lighting design is the overall lighting design which you do for the any residential or commercial interiors.
It is one of the most overlooked and underestimated areas for any person, even the interior designers.
Though it is important to understand the effects of ambient lighting design for any person but for interior designers, it is the most important aspect, and it is the finishing touch that sums up the whole effects of the interior design.
In any simple room, you may have the ceiling bulb. Simplistically, it is your ambient light and the key light of the room, which is helping to illuminate the whole room in even proportion. And it has a standard effect, you mostly use it to lighten the room, to live, eat and work. That is all.
However, the formal and professional ambient lighting design is specially conceptualized for the purpose of creating special moods and psychological effects on the human behaviors.
You need to create a magical effect with the lighting design so that when someone walks in, he or she gets sucked in the special mood of the place and wants to prolong his or stay.
4 Aspects of Ambient Lighting Design
The color temperature;
- What color you want to choose, the cool white, warm yellow or warm white
The brightness;
- Whether you want to use the dimmer for high and low intensity
The accent lights – hidden, deflective
- To create the depth of field, you may want to create some behind the walls, under the false ceiling or in the corner and sideways to add some depth.
The placements of the lights
- Based on the size of the room, or hall, where your placement should be: how many lights on the ceiling, on the walls, and how many hidden behind the layers. And how many corners illuminated by the lamps.
These are all the elements that go in designing your ambient lighting for any residential or commercial space.
Testing & Experimenting
The whole ambient lighting design must first be conceptualized on paper and then executed to do the testing and experimentation.
Ambient lighting design must be compatible with the type of the space. You will only get to know the real effects when you will apply it and feel it.
The Nature of the Place and the Target Audience
It is also important to understand the role of the place where you need to install the ambient lighting design.
If it is a home, it may have different design, if it is restaurant, it entirely will have a different design, and if it is jewellery store, it will even have different ambient lighting design.
Customization is the name of the game. No one lighting design can fit all places. It requires detail planning about the place and about the people who will use that place.
As you may have experienced that some cafés have dark ambient lights, and some restaurants are brightly lit. That is because of the reason that every café audience may be different form one another. Some cafes appeal more to the younger generation and some cafés are for family.
Both will have different ambient lighting requirements. Similarly, there are different corporate sector needs from banking to telecom and divers variety of retail stores.
The CRI – Color Rendering Index
Another technical aspect to understand is CRI – Colour Rendering Index which ranges from 0 -100.
It pertains to the ability to see the things in its true colors. If you are seeing the sea blue fabric, different lighting can show different variants of colours. That is what CRI it.
If your CRI is 50-80. It will not show the hundred percent true colours but will add some mood accents to the true colours, just like special effects to your selfies.
But if your CRI is 90+ then you will be able to see the nearest true colours of the things.
Though it may not matter much for the home setting or the restaurants and hotels, but it may matter more for the retail shops where they need to show the coloured items especially the garments and apparels.
Summing Up
To sum up, it is interesting to note that the ambient lighting design will help you to feel different moods, happy, sad, joyful, relaxed, even tense, and busy.
It will depend how you will want to execute your ambient lighting design whether for your home or for any retail and commercial establishment.
It is even equally important for corporate offices, where the staff needs to spend most of their time while working at their desks
Ambient lighting design plays a very pivotal role in your interiors. It should probably be the first thing to take care to plan it right at the beginning.
For more, you can also read another article on Ambient Lighting here.