Good thread. When Steve mentions abandoning “
incandescent lighting and color theory,
as the primary method to create a lighting design” that sounds about right to me. It doesn’t sound like completely eliminating
incandescent from curriculum, but rather accepting that when resources allow, LEDs are going to
play a primary
role in design process and results. I wouldn’t want to graduate students having zero experience with
incandescent, but it would be a mistake to confuse
incandescent and
gel technologies for fundamentals of lighting design. I do think
incandescent is useful to teach for all the reasons already mentioned, but it sounds correct to as resources allow
phase out teaching it as the primary/normal/regular way to light a
stage or studio. It may be in many places for many more years, and let’s give them some skills for it, but teaching
agility between technologies has to be a main goal along with teaching the undeniable “next thing” of
LED and whatever follows. Part of that agility involves an understanding of core design concepts, and part involves establishing an inquisitive practice that enables the student to leverage available equipment towards those ends, regardless of what the equipment is and whether or not they've had someone else teach them about it - the goal is for them to not need that. As much as lighting design is tied to technology, it's still useful to de-couple the two from time to time.
When there’s a sea-change in the technology we use, that’s when I think we notice more the ways in which prevalent technologies have become shorthand for discussing and thinking about design. We may have attachments to
gel transmissions and
incandescent dimming (I sure do) because across generations of use we have figured out so well how to
play to the strengths of those technologies, and have developed a whole creative culture around their particulars.
Gel numbers (and better yet “R78 @50” vs “R78 @FL”) are a really powerful shorthand for those who know their swatchbooks well (but really, how many non-LD collaborators do?) and further they’ve shaped the way lighting designers think and learn – that’s what interests me as an educator. Now we’re challenged with figuring it out over again with our new toys. We should start figuring it out now, a little
bit before
LED is truly dominant in all corners of the industry; then it would be too late to
prepare our students.
It’s immensely important to have something to push against, and the limitations of
incandescent have been one of those things providing the resistance that so often yields the most exciting and elegant design solutions when we push into it. If that wall is removed for students (rather than being navigated
by them) then they are off and sprinting blindfolded until they
splat into the next one without picking anything useful up on the way. Since changing over about ½ inventory to
LED (the dance
plot we do a lot of teaching with is nearly all
LED) my biggest teaching concern has been how to ensure students still learn to prosecute color decisions rigorously and in
advance of cueing sessions. If a student is looking for a night blue then I’ll still as always start by making them answer more questions to attach some useful adjectives and research efforts to the character of that night blue. But when the student stops listening somewhere between fifteen and zero words before I say “research” then if I’m teaching
gel I can open three swatchbooks and
point to dozens of options that could be “night blue” along with some “night” colors not blue at all, say “pick one and defend it” and the magnitude of the decision begins to set in. Without those
broad yet finite options
gel provides, I have to find other ways to impress the importance of infusing color with intent and specificity. Otherwise, a majority of students will get to tech and just flail a finger towards the blue corner of the touchscreen
color picker, see a really pretty
LED blue that may or may not have anything to do with the show and other design elements, and record. They have to get over the thrill of having all that color instantly at their fingertips before they get down to the art of dialing it in purposefully. So we spend a lot of time working on that with the
LED tools. That’s really the resistance I want them to push into next – the
ease of access to color, and how that
ease affects color decisions for better and worse. Also, how that
ease affects decisions about angle, texture, movement…
Consider that one of our goals ought to be to, by modeling and providing practice, prepare students to lead the next (probably several) sea-changes in technology in ways that preserve and enhance the artform rather than dumbing it down. Here’s a good opportunity to
build those adaptive skills. Teach the characteristics of the technology and how they solve old challenges and create new ones all under the umbrella of rigorous and
practical design thought.