Abhay Wadhwa, AWA Lighting Designers
Wednesday
March 19, 2025
11:00 am - 12:00 pm EST
March 19, 2025
11:00 am - 12:00 pm EST
Credits TBD
Advanced
Traditional lighting often overlooks the potential of natural elements and scientific principles that enhance well-being. This presentation examines the impact of advanced techniques, focusing on integrating light, color, and sound (LCS) to improve holistic wellness and user experiences. Over the past decade, the understanding of light’s role in health has evolved, moving from concerns like fluorescent flicker and color shifts to embracing biophilic design towards reducing stress and alleviating mental health issues. By harnessing biomimicry, biophilic design, and wireless controls, LCS can trigger physiological and psychological responses. Attendees will gain practical methods to integrate strategies, fostering environments that support wellness.
Understanding of basics of lighting design, circadian rhythms, biophilic design, and frequencies of modalities is recommended.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the Impact of Light, Color, and Sound (LCS) on Wellness: Evaluate how different modalities—light, color, and sound—affect physiological and psychological responses, including circadian rhythms, mood, stress levels, and cognitive functions.
- Identify Advanced Lighting Factors and Techniques to Optimize Wellness: Explore and distinguish various advanced factors and techniques such as biomimicry and biophilic design, wireless controls, and integrative sound and color modalities to optimize wellness.
- Design for Physical, Emotional and Cognitive Well-being: Understand how specific LCS combinations can be tailored to support vitality, emotional balance, mental clarity, and overall cognitive function in various environments.
- Utilize Latent Potentialities of Modalities for Innovation Focused on Holistic Wellness: Explore and harness the hidden potential of LCS modalities to drive research-driven innovative design solutions that enhance user experience, improve environmental quality, and support holistic well-being in built environments.
Speaker
Abhay Wadhwa
Founder and Design Principal
AWA Lighting Designers
Abhay Wadhwa, founder and design principal of AWA Lighting Designers, sees lighting beyond its conventional purpose. Here, he crafts a story using lighting design and technology to create moments of experience, which factor into the psyche and emotions of those who work, live, or visit the spaces designed by AWA. While doing so, he is seeking innovative solutions that challenge convention while augmenting the integrity of the architects’ vision. In doing so, pragmatic lighting design nestles comfortably with artistry. He has also served as an adjunct professor for the Graduate Lighting Design Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s (RPI) esteemed Lighting Research Center (LRC) from 2003 to 2020. He is also the author of the recently released book “Contextualizing Light.”
Abhay founded AWA Lighting Designers in 2002. Abhay has been quietly focused on questioning the lighting zeitgeist ever since. Based in Hudson Yards, NY, he works extensively with the world’s leading architecture and design firms in the fields of commercial and mixed-use developments, urban planning, transportation, infrastructure, hospitality, and healthcare. He is an internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, educator, and author of numerous advanced light engineering and cultural lighting articles. He has worked with the United Nations Foundation on projects that address issues that marginalize many of the world’s population. Recently, he was invited to work with the Rural Haiti Project and Ethiopia’s Mary Joy Aid Through Development to improve the infrastructure, and in turn, the lives of its residents. He has also been referred to as the “Poet of Light” by a Canadian journalist and in lighter moments takes this title very seriously.