Lunch & Learn with IHCD | A Pleasure to See, Inclusive Museum Lighting Design

Everyone sees the world differently, but none of us sees anything without light. But as a lighting designer what I need to know is how the quality of the light impacts our quality of vision and even more importantly, what can we do about it. My work as a museum lighting designer has provided a wonderful laboratory to explore these questions because the job is paradoxical by nature. We must simultaneously: protect artworks from light while providing adequate illumination so people may enjoy the visual experience artists are offering. During this presentation, I will show the lighting techniques I’ve learned working in museums that may be applied wherever people want to see well.

About the Speaker

Scott Rosenfeld LC, IES is the lighting designer at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery. For over twenty years, Scott has worked on lighting art collections so they can be better seen, experienced, and preserved. The advent of energy efficient LED lighting led him to research new possibilities for manipulating the spectrum of light to enhance vision and slow the degradation of light sensitive materials. Scott’s collaborated with the US Department of Energy to field test LED products in museum applications, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to access the color rendering attributes of light, and with the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) to better quantify how light damages art collections. Scott is chair of the IES Museum Committee where he led a team of experts to publish the 2019 Recommended Practice for Museum Lighting.