What about offices?
Are there any way we can optimize the light indoors?
Yeah.
So there are many new technologies and architectural designs that those are now coming into picture
for office design.
The open office design and having large windows, those are all part of this new scheme.
And the fortunate thing is now glass manufacturing has come to a point where glass can be both
aesthetic, as well as load bearing.
So some of the glasses are strong enough that they can even take some of the load of the
building.
So that enables designers to come up with large walls, which are just glass walls that
will allow enough light to seep in.
And then in large offices having cubicles with enough head space through which daylight
can come through and kind of distribute throughout the large space is helping to bring daylight,
at the same time reduce energy bill by reducing artificial lighting.
All of these are helping.
Then at nighttime, there's also innovations in office space design.
You can have light layering so that you can have more personalized light because you can
light up a cubicle or office with LED lights that can be dimmed or brightened up to the
occupants own choice.
So there are a lot of innovations that will actually help to optimize this anthropogenic
world for circadian rhythms.
And lighting itself is a $27 billion industry.
And for the first time in human history, we have near complete control over the quality,
quantity, and timing of light that we can have in our workplace or in our home.
So there will be a lot more innovations in this area where, maybe in future, we can have
our body sensors talking to the building sensors and building control system to automatically
adjust lighting, adjust temperature that will nurture our health.
What about in countries with very little winter daylight?
I mean, is there something like some sort of lights indoors that you can buy to kind
of help stimulate the daylight?
Yes.
If you look at many of the big lighting companies, they're actually from those northern latitudes
because I guess they have been experimenting with light for such a long time that they
come up with all these innovations.
And the rule of thumb is if you go to buy purchase a light bulb, then you will see there
are three different flavors of light.
One that looks orange color, and it's very much like candlelight or firelight.
And that's good for evening time in your bedroom or wherever you don't like to have too much
bright light.
And then there is blue-shifted light, which looks very blue, very alerting, super bright
white.
And those are the lights that can help us in wintertime.
And many of the cold countries of Northern latitude or extreme Southern latitude countries,
they have adopted using light to uplift their mood.
So many of those designs now incorporate both orange-shifted light and blue-shifted light
at different time of the day or in different seasons so that in winter time you can have
more of the blue-shifted indoor light to improve your mood and alertness and even brighter
light to improve your mood and alertness.
And conversely, in summertime, when the days are extremely long, they're also adopting
good window blinds, window shades, and orange-shifted light to simulate evening time so that they
can go to bed and they can get restful night of sleep. 📍 📍