52|PROTAGONISTA come up with ideas about light and we design and specify lighting solutions. Manufacturers develop lighting products and tools and they sell them. We need the tools and they make them. It’s important that we have a healthy dialogue so they can discover the tools we need and we get the tools we want. For me, this relationship is a very positive, collaborative relationship and it only goes wrong where somebody believes that maybe this relationship can be one-sided. In other words, manufacturer decides to do the lighting design as well as making and selling the products, but at the same time also wants us to be the specifier. To my mind, this would be like us doing architecture. I am an architect as are many of the people the work in our studio, but we do not do architecture. Why not? Because we would be competing with the people we are collaborating with. For me, the relationship is really clear. How do you see the future of the lighting designer? I see it as very positive. In my 30 plus year career, I have seen huge changes, particularly in education, leading to more young people coming into lighting design and more lighting practices opening up all over the world. More people: clients, architects, the public, are beginning to recognise the importance and the value of light, and not just because they want to save some energy. They know that if you are going to use energy, and spend money, you might as well spend it wisely, on something “I always felt that lighting design from Japan looks and feels different from the lighting design from Europe, and different again from lighting design from America. Now we begin to see many other cultures inputting their own cultural values into lighting design, and this is something really special to behold. “ Medius House. ©Morley von Sternberg