Page 48 - College Planning & Management, March 2018

LIGHTING THE WAY ON CAMPUS
from the campus’ ubiquitous acorn lights, which are synonymous with the school’s identity.
At DePauw University, the East College project catalyzed a holistic look at the campus’s lighting challenges and plans for future growth. Collaborating with DePauw’s master planners, HOK helped stakeholders define future major access points on campus and determine how lighting could identify them. As these entry points and central gathering spaces change, so will primary pedes- trian paths and secondary roadways.
Next, stakeholders should visit other campuses both during the day and night to understand what they like and inform their goals for campus lighting. There is no substitute for personally experiencing certain lighting techniques. HOK even takes our clients to tour corpo- rate campuses and well-planned city districts to help them experi- ence innovative techniques being used outside of college campuses.
Armed with this benchmarking information and a clear project scope, Heutel recommends that universities go through a lighting charrette with their design partner. This conversation will encour- age university leaders and stakeholders from the facilities, opera- tions, and maintenance departments to discuss lighting strategies that have or haven’t worked in the past and how they hope to use lighting in the future to create the best campus experience.
Lighting the Campus of the Future
For some universities, the charrette leads to conversations about future technology. While many of these concepts are in their early stage of development, they provide a glimpse into the campus of the future
• Tracking Technology. Global positioning technology, to date
used mostly in interior environments, allows universities to track people’s movements across a campus. “Imagine a student walking from the library to her dorm at 2 a.m.,” says Heutel. “This tracking technology, which could be embedded in light fixtures, would allow campus security to chart her movements. This same technology could be applied to track campus assets like golf carts or vehicles carrying materials or people. In the future, this notion of using light fixtures for data collection and security could have serious implications on how we approach lighting design, including the positioning of fixtures.”
• Interactivity. Students and staff move between buildings at all hours. Interactive, responsive lighting could go beyond motion sensor-activated lighting and illuminate entire paths as sensors recognize movement. If an individual is looking for a destina- tion on campus, an interactive app could allow him to identify the building on a map and responsive lighting could light up the pathway leading to that building.
• Health and Wellness. Data and lighting controls can positively impact the health and well-being of students. The color of white light, for example, can be manipulated to impact circadian rhythms. In the classroom of the future, a professor will be able
WALK THIS WAY. Options for exterior lighting on campus include bollards that function as light fixtures at and after dark. While they are commonly used to keep traffic away from people, parks, lawns, and buildings, bollards with lights can become a featured addition to illuminate and accent landscaping, walkways, buildings and parking areas, as well as provide wayfinding and improve security by increasing visibility.
to push a button and enhance a student’s ability to learn by changing the color temperature, perhaps by making the class- room brighter to prevent students from nodding off after lunch. It’s even possible that universities would look to lighting profes- sionals and researchers to find out how light could be prescribed to affect the students’ daily biorhythms.
• Revenue Generation. Geofencing, the use of GPS or RFID technolo- gy to create virtual geographic boundaries, is a relatively new concept on campuses. Geofencing requires participants to opt in to push noti- fications and location-based tracking through a mobile app. If poten- tial customers are driving by a Target store, for example, they could trigger app notifications about relevant sales based on their past buying patterns. Students and staff walking past a campus bookstore or coffee shop could be detected by geolocation markers embedded in light fixtures and relevant discounts or upcoming events could be shared with them. Retailers value this data, which could create a new revenue stream for the university. This same technology could help attract students to academic and social events.
One caveat about equipping light fixtures with tracking tech- nology is that this can produce overwhelming amounts of data that needs to be analyzed to make it useful. But this presents an enormous opportunity for universities to take ownership of the data to benefit the student experience.
“Lighting can transform the campus experience,” says Heutel. “These new technologies and the data that they produce, when coupled with contemporary security, wayfinding, and branding strategies, give us a window into the campus of the future—one with endless opportunities for lighting to positively shape the environments where we learn, live and grow.” CPM
Tom Kaczkowski is the director of lighting design at HOK (www. HOK.com), a global architecture, engineering, and planning firm. He can be contacted at tom.kaczkowski@hok.com.
46 COLLEGE PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / MARCH 2018
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