Speaker 1: 0:00

I don't want AI to do lighting design for me. It's the opposite. I want AI to actually make my lighting design better. You know AI is not going to replace lighting designers. They're not. Nobody will be able to be replaced when they have that wealth of knowledge in a particular subject, and AI is nothing more than a tool that learns. So if you actually teach them the wrong things, it will give you the wrong result. It's important that we train our models in the most appropriate manner and by the people that know the subjects. Any mistakes that you make on training your models or your agents then cannot be erased from their memories. It feels that you need to restart training something different in order to get the right result. All of your work can go quickly to the bin if you actually make a mistake in that front.

Speaker 2: 1:02

Juan Ferrari. Welcome to Light Talk.

Speaker 1: 1:05

Thank you. Thank you, Martin. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

Speaker 2: 1:09

It's a pleasure to actually have conversations with you in any platform and in this platform yeah it has been quite a while since we last spoke, that's for sure, but I'm having you here because I want to talk about AI and the future of lighting design. But before we dive into that, give me a little bit of your background. A lot of people know you, but there's also probably some of our audience that don't know you so good. If you gave us a bit of your background in terms of where were you born, what did you study, how did you get into the position you are today?

Speaker 1: 1:42

It's a very convoluted journey, as most of the lighting designers in the industry I I I'm argentinian. I was born in buenos aires many, many, many years ago I'm not going to tell you when was that, but many years ago, you need to trust me there. Um, I trained as an actor and and then I started directing theater and then I actually started performing and then I started getting involved in all of the technical aspects of theatre, and technical aspects that I liked the most was lighting, and I became kind of an accomplished theatre lighting designer To the point that I started doing things that were over and above what I thought I knew. So I came here to the UK to study theatre lighting design. I studied at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, I did my course there, I did a BA in theatre lighting and from there on, while I was at university, I started shifting my attention to architectural lighting. I find it fascinating that the narrative that we had in theatre and that I have actually lived as an actor and as a director and as a lighting designer in theatre didn't naturally exist in architectural lighting. So I actually started paying attention to that and starting exploring that, to the point that I ended up working in architectural lighting.

Speaker 1: 3:14

So I got my first job as an architectural lighting designer in a company called Equation that has now changed hands. It's the actual equation. It's the GIA equation, but at that point, mark Hensman was actually the director at Equation. So I started working there. I met some of my colleagues, my current colleagues. You had Horley there, in particular.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Jonathan Rush and John then moved to Horley and I moved shortly after, and since then we have actually been developing the lighting team for Hawley, first at the direction of Dominic Merrick and now under our own direction. So between me, jonathan and Ruth Kelly-Wasket, we are actually running the lighting design department of Hawley, which is quite a and a very well recognized and well established lighting design department in its own right within a massive, really big engineering company that is also part of a bigger, even bigger multinational company called tetratech. So that's my role at the moment. I direct a team of 25 people in lighting design. They're lovely. They're really, in my view, the most creative people that I have actually met, with an enormous understanding of the technical knowledge that you need to have in order to deliver the best quality lighting design possible. So, yeah, that's my role currently and I love talking, so I do a lot of talks.

Speaker 1: 4:46

No, no no, you're here to talk. I'm quite curious also, martin. So that's why I ended up working and exploring AI, which is another big story, another long story in its own right. We'll get to that, we'll get to that.

Speaker 2: 5:06

I've got a cheeky question. That's the fact that you have been an actor being of help in your, in your profession, when meeting clients or uh, I think that I, actually, I, I think that I it helps.

Speaker 1: 5:21

Communicating anything that you do to understand your body, to understand the way that you express yourself, to understand the emotions that you feel while expressing, and any sort of register that you get of your own tools, of your own physical, emotional tools, is quite helpful in any environment. So, yes, it helped me it. It, to be honest, um, one of the most important things for me is to to be able to communicate properly, and lighting is a very difficult. It looks very easy, but it's very difficult to communicate in words, and and I think that my, my theater background have helped me enormously, and then the notion that lighting is a tool that actually tells stories and that has a narrative. All of that piece of work of mine is based on my experience in theatre really, so yeah it has helped me a lot, yes.

Speaker 2: 6:20

Yeah, I think it's a great combination because in theatre lighting your focus is technically on the actors when you light, but in architectural lighting it's more about lighting the architecture. So I think that combined knowledge I think is great.

Speaker 1: 6:37

Also in architecture, it's not only lighting the architecture, it's lighting for people using it. So, although we don't necessarily experience our lives as a play or as a narrative, we don't feel that our lives are a story. We are actually living through emotions, in the same way that we are living through emotions at play. So it's quite important that lighting takes into account the feelings and the journeys that people have within the architectural spaces, and that's one of the most important things for me.

Speaker 2: 7:12

So let's jump into AI straight away. At what point of time did you get caught by the AI bug?

Speaker 1: 7:21

I actually it's quite funny I do a talk about AI and I actually expose myself quite in a big manner in that particular talk because I'm a user of AI and user and abuser of AI. So I started playing with AI on a journey to Birmingham actually were we were in the car and and particularly with chat gpt um. We were in a car a few years ago and one of my colleagues that was traveling with me shared with me this new thing that have come out called chat, gpt and um, and I asked chad gpt a particular question about uh lighting and he'd answered it in a way that I couldn't answer it, even if I was given an hour or two to respond to that particular question. I went like, wow, this is quite impressive because in a microsecond, all of a sudden I get an answer that was quite solid and it was very much technically um and I thought this is quite interesting. And so the iald was doing their enlightening conference and calling for papers and I actually composed a paper completely with ai about ai and lighting, but that without me knowing a lot about ai, and the paper got selected. So all of a sudden I had to learn about AI in order to present about AI, which is a which is a an unfortunate, fortunate situation. You know, it was a little bit cheeky from me and that was quite successful talk because, as I say, I exposed myself into a point in which I said, look, I don't know anything about AI, I just put this into AI and I prepared a presentation all through AI. And then this is my story If you fast forward, this was three years ago now, almost two and a half years ago, and if you fast forward to today, I am actually constantly training myself on these new tools and in in ai that are available to us.

Speaker 1: 9:29

I'm playing with all of them, I use them on a regular basis. I I encourage people. I think that my mission on this, on this particular front, is to encourage people to use it. Some people are quite scared. They have ethical concerns, they have moral concerns, they have all sorts of concerns, and the only way of actually making this tool a less uh, a lesser problem is using it, you know.

Speaker 2: 9:55

So I'm encouraging people to use it I'm a bit like you because I mean, I just got late last year something I I got in touch with it and then, um, I I know if you have seen, but I'm I'm promoting an ai course for for lighting designers, which I'm doing with an ai specialist which, like you, he's an architect, he's been in this for the last couple of years, he knows everything of ai, he dreams and and lives ai. But I I feel also a bit bit reluctant and a bit overwhelmed by all the possibilities. And you talked about the tools two years ago. Well, you see what speed they evolve and develop, so what's possible today?

Speaker 2: 10:36

But for me, the reason to jump in is to be the reason to be. You see, I've got 45 years of experience in lighting design, so I can actually sort of being the challenger and the reasoning behind what AI throws at us and look at it through the lighting design expertise that I have and say, well, is this correct? Yes, and, like you say, what comes back is sometimes amazing, like really the knowledge. So, yeah, I think it's important to have that balance and you can't better learn, I think, than really diving into it and embracing it, because there's no way we can go around it. It's there. It's there for us too. It will be like the mobile phone. It's something that's going to be there as a new revolution, and if you're not in it, you're not going to win it, that's for sure.

Speaker 1: 11:28

So talk about tools.

Speaker 1: 11:30

Yeah go ahead. Yeah, I think that is portant. I think that you need to be able to use it and to be in it. There is something generationally. It's a really interesting conversation, the generation conversation. There is something generationally. It's a really interesting conversation, the generation conversation.

Speaker 1: 11:45

It's like we did within our lifetimes. We went from a pencil and a piece of paper to a typewriter I would put myself in that category To a computer, to the internet and to AI, and we did that. I'm going to disclose my age now I'm 50. So within 50 years, I've done that. I'm going to disclose my age now I'm 50. Yeah, so within 50 years, I've done that. My journey took 50 years. If you think about it. Our kids nowadays learned all of that in a period of 10 years.

Speaker 1: 12:19

So imagine how much all of this tool-related relationship that we have with our profession any of our professions will evolve in the next 40 years for them. What will come, we don't know, but it's going to be definitely at the pace that we are currently exploring it. So it's going to be magical, you know. So it's incredible the amount of change that is ahead of us. So what we need to build in ourselves is the possibility of being flexible and grab these tools that are given to us. And today today, yeah, we're in 2025.

Speaker 1: 12:59

The tool that we are using, or a lot of people are using, is Chak, gpt or DeepSeq, but tomorrow it will be another one, and but tomorrow it will be another one, and the day after it will be another one. So what you need to be able is to become permeable to all of these tools that are coming to you, to be able to use it, and the way of really using them is having a reason to use them. So I think that the second bit of an NEI conversation is what do we want to do with them? What do we want to do with AI? Because if you don't have an answer of what do we want to do with it, then we cannot use that tool.

Speaker 2: 13:36

Okay, so tell me, what are we going to do with AI?

Speaker 1: 13:40

What are we going to do with AI? What are you doing? Maybe?

Speaker 2: 13:43

better. What are you doing at the moment with AI and what do you think we should probably be doing?

Speaker 1: 13:50

So let's start with a very basic point of what do we do with AI? The first thing that we do with AI is try to streamline our mundane tasks. You know, those things that we don't like doing, like writing emails. What do I use AI for? To write my emails. I turn not to write any more emails. I actually tend most of the time to dictate an email to an AI. The AI composes. I review that email send.

Speaker 2: 14:19

I still need to correct, you still have to prompt, so that means you still need to write something.

Speaker 1: 14:23

No, I do that verbally. It flies into the prompting. So I do that verbally, I do it on the microphone, so I actually dictate it to okay all right, okay, okay, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't write it.

Speaker 1: 14:35

I actually go um, write an email to martin class and I want to actually discuss this next interview that we're doing together. I want to know the subject that we're going to discuss. Send and the AI does it for me, formats it for me. When you're working on your second language and English is my second language.

Speaker 1: 14:54

This is a really, really time-saving tool. It does save me loads of time and I absolutely adore the fact of doing that mundane task for me. I use it quite a bit for research, so I build up project folders within within the AI, my AI of choice, and actually then say well, look this, this particular bot is going to act as a lighting agent or a lighting person, and and then it has this amount of experience and actually based all of his knowledge on this, this, this, this piece of information. And then I ask say that I want to research I don't know um the the of anything, what, what did the dinosaurs do before they die? Basically, I asked the AI to train as a dinosaur expert. Then it would tell me back, it would actually start giving me facts of what were the last things, what was the last supper from the dinosaurs, and all of that, doing research, doing you do that with.

Speaker 2: 16:04

NGPT research, or are you using other tools?

Speaker 1: 16:07

I I use I currently use because of my, of my company policies. We are quite restricted of what we can actually use or not use for work. So I obviously experiment on a personal computer, but I also, when I'm working, I have a chat gpt enterprise which is probably the latest version of chat gpt with a full package around it. So it has dali, it has saw, it has other other cameras and other and other um and other services that chat gpt brings. But it's actually ring fenced so the information is actually kept confidential. So I can actually handle confidential information within ChatGPT Enterprise without having to share it with the world, because obviously, as you would understand, we do things that are confidential in our jobs and our clients would be happy if we disclosed that information into different AI services. So I use that quite a lot. I experiment a lot with the visual side of AI. So basically, I use Midjourney, I use Runway, I try to explore, I'm trying to get to a point in which our lives become our presentation life. You know that we we have done many presentations and we we actually love the movement in the presentation and we love the visual engagement in the presentation, and we live in a world of instagram now. So we live in a world that images move and flick and move quite quickly and and I look at our lighting presentations generally and they're quite static. So I'm trying to get a little bit more of a different way of presenting through AI at the moment, which I'm exploring and I have to admit, martin, I have not refined this, but I have actually got to the point that I actually don't present static images anymore. I kind of animate them through runway in my presentation. So I use that quite a bit and it's quite interesting. The problem with images and moving images and generating moving images in AI is that it starts deforming objects and I know there are some certain people that do it in a marvelous way. I'm not one of them, but I'm getting there. I'm not a. I know there are some certain people that do it in a marvelous way. I'm not one of them, but I'm getting there. I'm actually playing around and trying to get to that sort of image movement within the AI world that I'm exploring.

Speaker 1: 18:39

And then there is the use for AI, of which would be probably the iterative design conversation, when you have to bring a lot of options, so giving the machine an option and say, look, give me the lighting design for this room. Or I assume that I want a lighting design for this room with downlights and offer detail, and I want some up lighters here and there. Just give me some other options and it would quickly give me options on the way that I actually could approach the lighting to that space. Now I could think about those options on my own. Obviously, I've been doing lighting design for so many years, but sometimes the the quirky nature of ai, the hallucinations of ai, actually open another dimension, you know, and give you yes, give you an option that you have not thought to and it's kind of ridiculous, but it's lovely at the same time, you know. So it's. It's that, it's another thing that I use?

Speaker 2: 19:32

do you challenge your designs as well using ai? Because I think that's another opportunity that we now have is just feed the design into the ai tool and ask it to challenge. We are currently doing research and I'm talking about the AI course that I'm developing at the moment. One of the things that we are trying to figure out is whether we can input, like a dialects calculation for argument's sake and then see whether AI can say can we improve this, how can we make this better. See whether AI can say can we improve this, how can we make this better. But I think it would hold for any sort of design proposal that you make that you can actually challenge your own design creation. It's like how could we improve that or are there any weaknesses in this? What works or doesn't work? Are you doing that as well?

Speaker 1: 20:22

Yeah, we do that. So we do that in artificial lighting and in daylighting too. So we use the basics of what we have been doing pre-AI in parametric design with Rhino and Grasshopper in order to, for example, just actually build up a room and say what's the most efficient opening that I can have as a window in terms of, I don't know, thermal comfort and and um, sorry, um heat gain and and um and uh and uh, daylight, um, daylight, um, penetration and and basically we have used, I don't know, grasshopper and and rhino for many years in in giving us those numbers, you have to think that we are an engineering firm, so our numbers are quite important to us in many ways and so we have been playing with them for many years. So AI actually brings another level of joy to that and another level of speed.

Speaker 1: 21:18

And, yes, definitely on the artificial lighting side, if you don't remember wrong, relux used to have this tool that you can give them in a, in a rectangular box, not the most complex of geometries, but in a rectangular box. It would give you the the most efficient way of actually placing your luminaires within, within, within your plan, and and I think that that was pre-ai, you know. So, yes, we, we have been playing around with that. A challenging design through ai is quite important, in the same way that doctors challenge their findings with AI. You know, you have heard that doctors, for example, they have a scan and they're actually searching for I don't know tumors or things like that, and they go like, well, have I actually looked at this x-ray properly? And the AI will actually say, well, you haven't looked at this bit here.

Speaker 1: 22:06

Actually you might want to look at that, because that's kind of not very common.

Speaker 1: 22:11

But in order to actually get to that point, martin, as you would know, you have to train your AIs, and that's a critical thing. An AI is nothing more than a tool that learns, so if you actually teach them the wrong things, it will give you the wrong results, in the same way that if you input the wrong parameters into a lighting calculation, you will get the wrong results and it will be meaningless. So it's important that we train our models in the most appropriate manner and by the people that know the subject. So any mistakes? What I do find out is that any mistakes that you make on training your models yeah, or your agents then cannot be erased from their memories and it keeps on repeating and it feels that you need to restart training something different in order to get the right results, so all of your work can go quickly to the bin if you actually make a mistake. On that front, I think that data sets are quite critical, so basically, having the right data to inform these AI agents is absolutely a must.

Speaker 2: 23:25

You mentioned training, so are you the only one in the company doing that? I would assume that you're not the only one and that you have your own team on this.

Speaker 2: 23:34

I can also imagine that you I don't know whether you have like an office model and a personal model, because you can train, I, on, on, on on your personal uh data that you want, uh, whatever I I tool to follow. But if you use an enterprise version, I don't have an enterprise version, I have just the pro version. But yeah, um, you, you train, I, I'm trying, I'm just, I'm just a starter, so I'm I'm training it all myself. I can imagine that if you have an I don't know whether the enterprise works as a collective so that multiple people can use the same tool, so the training is more.

Speaker 1: 24:17

You can create a bot and then share it with other people. So, yeah, you can actually train an agent or a bot and then that share it with other people within enterprise. You can do that. You can do that in pro. I can actually share information with you that I want to share with you, or a bot that I want to share with you. That that shouldn't be a problem. Yeah, they are compatible so in that respect.

Speaker 2: 24:40

So I can actually do things from pro to pro, can you maybe explain a few of the training things that you're doing? How do you train that to do exactly what you want it to do, or to make it machine learn what you want the AI tool to become? You talk about agent. Are you really already creating an agent or is it just a way? I mean, people talk about agent as an autonomous tool, but I would imagine in this case, you're talking about an agent as something that you have trained.

Speaker 1: 25:17

Yeah, more starting with a bot concept and then trying to get it to go to an agent. But the bot concept is basically you have your GPTs. Yeah, just create your own GPT. It's exactly that. That's what I'm trying to say. What we do is we create our own GPT.

Speaker 1: 25:36

A GPT, for example, can be, say that you wanted to create room data sheets, sheets. So what you need to embed into the bot, into the GPT, is the knowledge of where they need to actually grab the parameters in order to create a room data sheet. So you will actually connect the knowledge of the AI to the standards that you need to actually comply with. And you will feed all of that and you'll say, look, on the room data sheet level, I need to get this parameter.

Speaker 1: 26:12

So, basically, I don't know illuminance levels, glare, yeah, all of the parameters that we use in lighting. And from there on, the machine will actually start understanding how to get you to that point. So, basically, then you will upload a drawing. It will say you have I don't know you have. Say that you're in a hospital, you have a clean room, you have a treatment room, you have a I don't know an operation theatre. Yeah, then it would just tabulate in a table very quickly all of the levels and all of the parameters that you need to hit within each one of those rooms.

Speaker 1: 26:55

That's an enormous time-saving bot, for example, for us. So basically we use that on a regular basis.

Speaker 2: 27:04

But I can imagine you can also create your spec sheets and other documentation as templates that you can just call back if you want to.

Speaker 1: 27:19

We are quite so. We have actually done a swimline diagram of all of our processes. So this is outside of AI. So we've done lighting design. What do we do From the moment somebody tells us we have a job for you?

Speaker 2: 27:39

We would like to discuss this.

Speaker 1: 27:41

What do we do? What sort of information? What sort of information goes out in what sort of program? Who gets involved in it? So we have actually done a swimline diagram of all of our processes and we are trying, against each one of those processes, different AI tools. Now we haven't yet developed a tool, an AI tool that assists us with each one of those processes. We've been miles away from some of them, which are the ones that we would really like to have. So, for example, I would very much like AI to assist us with the Revit integration of our design. So if we had a model, if, ideally, we have a model from day one how AI can actually start populating things in a logical manner for us, because that's a really time consuming exercise for anybody at the moment and we're trying that.

Speaker 1: 28:37

That relationship between the calculation program and Revit and how they link together. We seem to be modeling and modeling, and modeling and modeling, and AI doesn't seem to be able to help us. So we do a model for a calculation and we populate a model like if it was a drawing, which is really uncomfortable. And why are we not using the same model? So that streamlining all of those processes and getting AI to help us with all of those processes would be the future. That's what we're exploring. But in essence, on that streamline diagram that I was talking to you about, with all of our processes, what we are testing is against each one of those processes and what can we use and what technology can we use and what tools can we use in order to actually make them more efficient and better?

Speaker 2: 29:23

And I think the thing is that today it might not yet be possible, but tomorrow it will be. I mean, it's developing and evolving so fast that, um, it's whatever we have in mind that we think will be able uh, in in in the near future will happen. I'm pretty sure of that. Um, it's just a matter, like you say, you need, you need to get your hands dirty and and play with it and explore, but then you have also, I mean, exploring things within your enterprise platform is one thing, but then exporting it to a client is another thing. So I would imagine that you have some checks and balances there in how, what is it that you can use towards your client? In what is it that you can use towards your client? You probably need to excerpt things and maybe some you don't want the client to have and some things you might think are private to you.

Speaker 1: 30:20

So how is that, martin? In that respect, we're quite transparent with our clients. We have systems in place to make sure that all of our information, in the same way that you have IT systems, make sure that all of our information doesn't get leaked and doesn't get compromised, and therefore that's why we work with enterprise, which maybe is a lesser it's not the pro version, it's probably a step behind but what gives us is a ring fence of the information and making sure that everything is secured within our own service. So that is quite critical for us.

Speaker 2: 30:58

So and then you know what I meant I meant to upon is that you, if you do it on an individual basis, you control what you put out there, but if you have a team, you still need to have a unified company uh restricted or company managed uh output and and the bigger your team, the more complex that might be, because people may go in different directions. So I mean standardizing the way you present to your client. That was more what I meant.

Speaker 1: 31:30

Yeah, well, it's part of the quality management that we actually do. So any company, any large company, you would know. We have quality management rules and basic quality management procedures that we need to follow, and we actually do the same with AI. So AI is no different to any other things that we do. We had to.

Speaker 1: 31:53

There is something it's a bit more complicated to control In a world that is never evolving and you want people to explore tools. It's very difficult to do it within a multinational company. So that's where you actually have dedicated exploration and research machines and then you have your day-to-day machine in which you can do your job in a secure manner. But that comes onto the professional. The way that we handle information needs to be very, very much controlled, because if not, we would be making things that we don't want to leak. So, uh, but, but.

Speaker 1: 32:32

But at the same time, you want to encourage your design team and your people to explore things. What? What actually surprised me and I'm going to go back quickly to one of your questions I don't think I answered which is you said to me did you, does? Your whole team works with ai and we work at very different levels, you know, and in very different ways and I encourage them to work with AI. I actually go like please use them. We have loads of options within the suites that we have within Holi for them to actually play with, but sometimes they don't find it's like with everything. Sometimes a tool is not useful to them and they actually might choose to do it in a different way and without the assistance of an ai. So that's, that's a choice, you know, and and um, I don't think you can push people into ai.

Speaker 1: 33:17

I think it's a pity if people do not go into the eye because, exactly, martin, it's the same thing that happened with I don't know autocad. You would actually said to people at some point there were people drafting drawings and doing lines and working on it, and, and, and those people thought that they could keep on drawing by hand and some of them were reluctant to actually engage with AutoCAD and at some point nobody was drawing anymore and everybody was drawing in CAD. So it happens with every single tool that comes into the market. People would have said the same thing from the internet, from Photoshop, from everything, the calculation programs.

Speaker 2: 34:00

People used to do lighting calculations by hand.

Speaker 2: 34:03

Yeah, some people are more comfortable than others. I mean some are sort of naturally flowing into it. Others I mean I'm literally old generation, I started when we didn't have are more comfortable than others. I mean some are sort of naturally flowing into it. Others, I mean I'm literally old generation, I started when we even didn't have computers. So you know this my first, my first encounter with the computer was a huge mainframe that was sitting in a big room where you had to do punch cards and things like that for lighting calculations. But that's well, okay, we talk I'm. I'm slightly older than you. I won't disclose my age, but 51. So how many people would you say are working on AI now, percentage-wise? Because of course I imagine you still have a bit of a dedicated team. Yes, you can encourage everybody, maybe even on email level, but even actual design production, that might be a different sort of approach.

Speaker 1: 34:57

How many people from my team, or how many people within Holi, or how many people in the world?

Speaker 2: 35:03

Okay, well, what is within your? That's a really interesting question. I actually Just expand. Well, what is within your Of my team? That's a really interesting question.

Speaker 1: 35:11

I actually I don't have a. I have to guess the answer of all of the three questions. Obviously, the world one is I don't know it would be of the 7 billion people that we are. I don't know how many people you say I guess that a lot, but on my team. So I have 25 strong in our team and I think on a daily basis, I would say that probably 70% of our team engages with AI. Pretty sure that everybody has engaged with AI in one way or another within our team and some people do more regularly than others. As I say, some of us use it all the time.

Speaker 2: 35:56

Yeah, I mean it's a bit addictive, let's face it. Once you get onto it, it's like it's hard not to use it.

Speaker 1: 36:05

Absolutely, absolutely. I use it as a search engine. I don't search anything else in Google anymore, I just search in ChatGPT. I find it easier. I find that the questions easier, the answers easier.

Speaker 2: 36:20

You know, even if you use Google search, you get into Gemini, it comes up with. The first thing that comes up is a Gemini answer. Right yeah?

Speaker 1: 36:28

I don't even like the expression of Google anymore. Basically, google gives me I don't know 100 results with three or four ads in the middle, and I've got to go. I need a phone number and I go to Chachipiti. I dictate to Chachipiti I need Martin Klaassen's phone number and it will just give me your phone number. Not a lot of ads and a lot of you know, soon you can even use my voice.

Speaker 2: 36:53

I'm currently cloning my voice. I have the first clone and I want to use it to do an e-book, so that you know my books. I can read them, but I don't want to read them. So I'll get my cloned voice to read my books, that's very good.

Speaker 1: 37:08

Writing a book is one thing, you know. I find that fascinating. What you're telling me is so enriching, Martin, because it's endless the amount of opportunity. I've never thought about it. Actually, I particularly have a problem with reading, because I read very badly. Imagine when you're reading on a second language. My eyes go completely crossed. But I adore the narrative of a book, so I adore the stories behind the book. Now, what you just told me opened my eyes, like that, you know, because it's great and I never thought about oh, why don't I actually train my AI to have my voice and then give them the books and read them back to me? That's perfect. It's an audio book with my own voice, which is great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 37:53

Well, soon you can read my book or listen to my book with my voice, exactly, exactly, remind me, I'm like you. I followed an AI course earlier this year that really opened my eyes. It was supposed to be a three-hour course. It ran out to nearly four hours and the opportunities and the things that were possible, that blew my mind away. And that's when I dived head in to develop this AI course, because I think people need to understand what's possible and get over the threshold of angst and the threshold of fear of what it all is and just see it for what it is. And then, of course, you need to make up your mind of what's good and bad about it, and not forgetting that it is an assistant and you really need to make sure that you keep the creative control and the creative mastership about what it all creates Right. But yeah, I think the opportunities are endless.

Speaker 1: 39:01

So I am doing a course called AI for Business Value and it's actually a mix between AI and a business course, which is quite interesting. It's on the right, it's an apprenticeship by Multiverse, which is a very basic course on both business and AI. But one of the things that is quite good about that course is, first, that everything in the course, within reasons and within the right parameters and the right way of doing it, should be and could be run by ai. You know so. There is no. There is no. You need to read this book. It's you. Do whatever you want. You. Give me the solution however you want. You, use the hour however you want you, even if you want to play back everything that ai says to you.

Speaker 1: 39:45

Obviously, there is a risk in doing that and we all know it. That's completely acceptable. So there is no. This is a task that you should be doing on your own without AI. Ai is there. It's like if nobody's not allowing you to use a pen, you know, here's a pen or a pencil. Ai is a pencil. Use it. And one other thing that we learned is that notion of making sure that the data sets are correct and that you're the reasons why you're using AI, that you have a reason to use it. What do you want to do? What bit of the lighting design process do you want to streamline and then find the right tools to do that.

Speaker 2: 40:29

It's quite an interesting course well, I I started, I'm still love sketching and I, I I'm on the I don't know if you have the same thing, the remarkable tablet where I can still draw, but it's, it's now digital, right. Yeah, you know the mark. So, and now I've started to do a sketch and then input it into an AI tool and ask it to develop it further, just from my sketch. Yeah, so there's also endless opportunities.

Speaker 1: 40:58

It's great, it's absolutely great. So, for example, one of the things that you know when you go into a meeting, you take notes. Yeah, yeah, and sometimes you do take notes by hand and sometimes you type them in. I tend to take notes by hand when I'm in a meeting, but before I actually used to look at my notes and type them back and play them back to I don't know a client or my colleague or whatever. Yeah, I now take a picture of my notes, upload it into chat gpt in this case and I extract the text and I have them all typed in.

Speaker 2: 41:33

Yeah, Well, you can also ask to make an audio version of it so that people can listen to it. They don't even have to. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 41:41

I haven't done that but, yes, we can yeah.

Speaker 2: 41:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah, those are all of them. I interviewed someone recently and it was also about an hour interview, but I asked Notebook LM to do a short version of it, like less than 50 minutes summary, and then you get two people talking to each other and, in a very, very concise and great way, you can just listen to the summary. In that way, you don't even have to look back. I wanted to ask you something about copyright and intellectual property, because obviously, as designers and creators, we always look at that element. How do you see that within the world of AI?

Speaker 1: 42:27

It's quite a complex subject, isn't it? Because AI in Europe, there's the EU directives on AI at the moment, so there is, there is meaningful legislation, but there isn't, there isn't in the UK at the moment. So it that it's, it's. We're evolving on all of that subject, you know, because I think it's quite critical that there is a degree of ownership, especially when it comes to creative material. I think there is something in there that needs to be legislated and I think it will be legislated properly.

Speaker 1: 43:07

If you ask me, I'm quite careful with that, because when you're extracting and you're generating, I try to generate my own work. You know, I've actually tried, but I'm sure that the model have learned from other people and I I don't. I wouldn't be able to tell if I'm actually infringing a copyright or not on a particular text, because I wouldn't know what the combination of words that other people have used to actually talk about a particular subject. So it very much everything that goes out and I stress this out everything that goes out that was created by AI needs to be stated, as with AI assistance. You know you need to. Actually we need to write into our, into a feedback. Yeah, you need to declare it. I know you need to. Actually we need to write into our, into a fee.

Speaker 1: 43:53

Yeah, you need to declare, you need to declare, yeah into into the, into the contracts that we go into, that we are going to use ai in that work.

Speaker 2: 44:04

It's absolutely fundamental that that is the case so your case is actually in your, in your contract. You already put in your contract.

Speaker 1: 44:12

We state that we would be or we could potentially be using. Yes, we just need to start doing that because, if not, it would be not being very clear on the way that we are working. No, I think we need to be honest and transparent about these things.

Speaker 2: 44:29

Yeah, I agree, and now is the time to start mentioning that, I think, because most people are starting to get familiar with it and you know there's also ways to potentially protect your work in case of non-payment, like now. We could potentially I don't know whether you, but it is something that's being explored by putting all your deliverables in the cloud with a subscription link and if you don't pay your subscription, you don't have access. You cannot download it, you can only work in there. You can see everything, but if a client, for argument's sake, would not pay, then you can't access the work anymore. We all experience situations where clients are tough paymasters and sometimes they want everything for free, or they want everything and they don't want to pay, or they are very difficult in payments. But potentially, through AI and to this kind of digital and to this kind of digital cloud situations, we could better manage that our whole payment schedules and all that.

Speaker 1: 45:41

Yeah, I suppose that's probably something that other companies would start actually exploring. I wouldn't be surprised if companies that have to do with legal, with legal, I don't know law companies, law firms are actually already looking into how that works and how they can bring a service on the back of that. Yeah, yes, in terms of copyright, just to wrap up the idea, it's very simple, Martin. Everything that I send is my responsibility, regardless of how I actually create it or not. You know, whatever I used to create it, if I press send on an email, nobody's pressing send for me on the email.

Speaker 1: 46:27

Yeah, so if I created an email with AI that says all sorts of horrible things. It's me sending it. So the one thing that we need to be careful in the same way that we are careful with anything that we do is that when we actually press send, that is a piece of information that we agree with. There is no point of blaming. There's enough law cases already.

Speaker 2: 46:52

It's part of your already. It's part of your professionalism, part of your integrity, you know, and transparency. I think in order to do business, you need to be in integrity, also for the longevity of your profession and your relationships with the client. I think, yeah, and also it's very dangerous.

Speaker 1: 47:12

It has. There are many law cases already of people that actually say no, well, sorry, I was actually doing this with an ai. I was well, who cares?

Speaker 2: 47:18

you know, it's your, it's your responsibility, uh, yeah, yeah, exactly, it's like say look, I didn't draft this, because I was drafting it in in in autocad or in revit, or I was actually creating this model in revit and I'm sorry, it's not it's not real because it's your responsibility Exactly, and it takes years and years to build up trust and respect, but it can be destroyed in minutes, so you really have to be very careful on how you treat your relationships in that respect. I want to make a little sidestep to Lux Futurum. You are a guest speaker on the Lux Futurum. You are a guest speaker on the Lux Futurum platform. You will be doing one of the promo tours in China, and thank you for that. What does I mean?

Speaker 2: 48:05

You know a little bit more about Lux Futurum now. It's a platform and a recognition program that aims to recognize future ideas, future concepts, future projects, products, things that sort of embody the spirit of the future, new innovations, and we really want to bring that foreground and give people the ability and opportunity to promote and share their ideas. And not only that the winners that are being shortlisted are then invited to the final event at the end of the year to actually present, because we feel that the learning experience and the knowledge sharing about why something was a selected winner is as important as just selecting it, because we want to share that information. What is it that made that so special? Um, I just want to hear a few, a few insights from from your, from your point of view, uh, what you think about luxury juror and and why you're so uh nice for us to support it oh, first I want to actually thank you for the invitation.

Speaker 1: 49:15

I think supporting any platforms that are actually looking at innovation is key to any development of any profession, not only in lighting.

Speaker 1: 49:27

I also really believe in the crossbreed of specialisms in terms of how they integrate, so this sort of innovation platforms will allow people to start thinking a little bit outside the box, and not only in lighting terms, but in lighting terms connected with other elements and how they all, and I think that that brings another level of innovation and design and development.

Speaker 1: 49:58

I've heard some really interesting talks about people that were doing innovation in not only lighting design terms, but in artificial intelligence terms in the 1970s, intelligence terms in the 1970s, and if those people would have had these platforms at that particular point, maybe we would have actually engaged with AI much earlier and we wouldn't have the winters of AI, as they call them, where people just say, well, it can't be bothered by AI anymore and they'd stop researching and they'd stop developing because we lost 20 years in doing that, you know.

Speaker 1: 50:37

And now, 20 years losing 20 years or not losing 20 years, who cares? But I thought that we would probably have a different way of working already if AI would have been developed around the 1970s and 80s, instead of actually being stopped and frozen on an AI winter. You know, very likely those platforms, these platforms like Futura, are the places for people to speak, to amplify what they're doing, to capture more imaginations, to capture more funding. To capture more imaginations, to capture more funding, to capture more track speed, and I think that's why I support them, you know, and that's why I like to participate in them.

Speaker 1: 51:24

They enrich me, martin, that's the thing, you know. I listen to people innovating speak and they enrich me my persona. I love that. I actually have to say that it's great because, in the same way that this conversation has enriched me with the, you know, when we're talking about your book, that you're reading your book to yourself. It's great, you know it's fantastic. It is fantastic.

Speaker 2: 51:48

You'll be cloning your voice very soon.

Speaker 1: 51:51

Definitely. Why not? Why not it's?

Speaker 1: 51:53

used in some medical you know there are some really bad health conditions that actually people lose their voices and the people record their voices and be able to play them back. How good is that, you know how? How really good is that and actually to be using it without my need. Is not that because I don't have a voice? It's because I really don't like the process of reading. I love reading, but I don't. I find it painful in my eyes and in my head. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's great that somebody, or my own voice, reads it back to me, you know, or my own voice reads it back to me.

Speaker 2: 52:32

You know, interestingly, in last year's submissions for Lux Futurum there was hardly any AI-related submission Quite surprising, but I would suspect that this year, with AI taking such a flight, that we would have more AI-related entries. I hope so. I haven't seen any yet with AI, but I would imagine and this year we're also specifically asking all the entrants to list and declare AI tools that they may have used in the submission, because I think, for clarity and also for educational purposes, it's important to understand what is humanly created and what is created with the help of AI tools. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 53:24

I think it's actually good to actually I think it's necessary to declare what you're using as a tool. The reality is that I would guess that most of the people have used AI last year. They just didn't declare it or, in some cases, they even hide it because they think there is a notion and this is a really interesting bit of a conversation which is a notion that everybody that is using AI is cheating. We need to move away from that. Everybody that is using AI is using a tool that is powering and amplifying what they're doing. They're not cheating, you know.

Speaker 2: 54:08

I think, if you declare that sort of idea of cheating, because you know I'm honest, I'm using this. I'm still the creator-in-chief, but I'm using this tool to help me. Another point that I wanted to highlight is that one of the goals of Lux Futurum is also to bridge East and West. You know China is the birthplace of. You know where most manufacturing of the lighting technology is being done. Most of our light is all coming from china. 90 is all made there and, if not, the full feature, the components are coming from there.

Speaker 2: 54:43

Um, and there is notion also, like you said, that oh, china, they are copiers and they're not really, um, you know, at the forefront of everything. But that has changed dramatically. China is very much an innovative country in that term. They, in some aspects, are ahead of the Western world in terms of digital integration, use of AI in many applications, and we felt that there's this apprehension about China, for, I mean, I've been coming to China for many, many years, so I don't have that. I know these lovely people and they have moved things forward quite dramatically, and I think the ability to connect East with West through this platform is also what drove us to develop this.

Speaker 2: 55:38

I would imagine that that's something that you can see.

Speaker 1: 55:42

Learning from others, from other cultures, from other people, is absolutely critical for any big shift and big development. I always use the same example Christopher Wren, which is the architect of St Paul's Cathedral and the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. One of them did the master plan for London after the Great Fire. He is one probably the most recognised British architect in history and when you look at his work you will understand that he had actually in some way looked in depth to the Romans and the Greeks. And he actually did depth to the Romans and the Greeks and he actually did. He went on tour around Europe, continental Europe, observing how these people before him have built buildings. You know and learned from them, and he uses all of those techniques in his design. Now, when you look at something like the Sheldonian Theatre and the ventilation in the Sheldonian Theatre not even the daylight, which is absolutely glorious in a space in a country that is Today- it's sunny, but it's usually overcast, it's incredible.

Speaker 1: 57:04

And he used all of the techniques that the Romans and the Greeks have used before him and made them better. So when the conversation about copying happens and I do copyright it's a different conversation. But learning from others and, again, bridging that gap between cultures and bringing them together and sharing their knowledge is absolutely fundamental. We grow together. You know, we don't grow. Human beings cannot grow on their own. They never could, they never will. Even when the most brutal middle of our history, when there were invasions and I don't know when the Romans invaded, they learned from the other cultures and they actually share their knowledge with them in a very violent way, but they actually did it, you, and it's fascinating, it's, I think. I think that it's celebrate celebrating this sort of events. It's important because it's not just a place where people show their, their innovations and try to get a prize or try is. They're sharing knowledge. We're coming together. We're sharing knowledge that everybody is a winner.

Speaker 2: 58:14

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, you said very rightly, you have to learn, and we say also often you have to learn from your mistakes, but you can't make all the mistakes yourself in your lifetime, so you have to learn from other people's mistakes as well, absolutely. But at the same time, you also learn from the good things that people do. So by looking around, you absorb that and there's no doubt that you see things and then somehow, subconsciously, you may use it in your own designs. It's logical.

Speaker 2: 58:46

Listen. I would like to wrap up with asking you is there anything that you would like or wish that we can do in the near future with AI? You know, looking ahead to the future of our profession, I mean, you and I are seasoned lighting designers and this whole AI thing is going to dramatically impact on what we're doing. You have gone through that in some of your expressions just now. Is there something still on your mind that you think, oh no, this is really something that I would love that we can do soon, or is maybe something you can already do, some sort of parting message that you would have for the new generation of uh live, designers of the future?

Speaker 1: 59:35

I, I'm, I wish, um, generally and this is this is something that I speak with my designers quite a bit which is, I wish generally that they allow themselves to play with light more often than not. We are lighting designers. We spend quite a bit of time behind a computer doing things for them to enable the play, and the play seems to be a really, really small portion of our job. I enjoyed and I enjoy the most when I'm actually seeing lights play around me and I'm playing with them, you know, even touching them or looking at them or experience them or setting levels and I wish that AI enables us to do much more of that by doing all of the mundane tasks for us. You know, just streamline all of the time that we spend in front of a computer trying to convey a message that we enable us to play, to be able to allow us to play with light. So, if you're a lighting designer, you like playing with light and therefore you need to be playing with light more often than not, and AI should actually simplify that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that that's what I wish for and I think that, across any specialism, I think that if AI can actually bring that level of joy of enabling people to do what they're best at doing, which is, in our case, lighting design. That would be brilliant. I don't want AI to do lighting design for me. It's the opposite. I want AI to actually make my lighting design better.

Speaker 1: 1:01:18

You know AI is not going to replace lighting designers. They're not. Nobody will be able to be replaced when they have that wealth of knowledge in a particular subject. So we have developed apps in the past, in in early 2000s, which we actually created a picture and people can actually plot lights onto a building and illuminate. They're not lighting designers. They don't know they. They have an inclination to do that. They don't have an inclination to play with it. So it's not that an ai will resolve the lighting design. Uh, for them. You know it's, it's, it's not going to happen. They will always be.

Speaker 2: 1:01:54

The job of lighting design will exist uh, you, you brought an interesting topic there because we didn't discuss that but the fact that you need hands-on experience to see what light does um, I think we we always said in our office don't specify a light that you you have never touched or played with, because you wouldn't know. It's important to really have that touch and feel and understanding visually and touch and feel type of thing to understand that. So that's something which because certainly, if you talk about the experience of lighting, you can go into a VR or AR side of the environment and do some virtual reality with playing around, but that's not the same and that's a bit. The risk that lies ahead is that people are going to experiment with lighting in a virtual space, right, rather than actually feeling it as a human being, and I think that point that you bring up is a really, uh, powerful message I think we need to make sure, as a, as a very small image, yeah, as a takeaway.

Speaker 1: 1:03:02

If ai can actually get us out of sitting in front of a computer to be able to play with whatever we like to play in my case, light that's a win, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 1:03:12

and I think train your eye model to tell you to get out and play with light, exactly yeah, just say, don't worry, uh, I'll deal with the nonsensical bits of your work and you go and play with light and be a better lighting designer, I think I think I think that's what I wish for. On a last note, I'm exploring the imagery that AI can generate, especially. I have explored in depth the static imagery that AI can generate, but the moving images is what I'm actually focusing at the moment. So, um, that that's, that's a. That's an advance that I've seen. So I've seen ai now actually understanding image terms, text, so they can actually incorporate text in a way that they couldn't a few months ago. The moving, the moving images are happening, but they're not there just yet. So I'm really looking forward to the next two, three months in which all of these AIs are going to be developed and probably feed into our business.

Speaker 2: 1:04:20

Maybe we should have this chat again in a couple of months and see how things have evolved.

Speaker 1: 1:04:25

Yeah, definitely We'll have it in, like Futura. So basically we'll definitely talk about these sort of things with some visual material there.

Speaker 2: 1:04:35

Well, you know, creative minds like you and me, we trigger each other every time we say something and it opens up another idea or another thing that we want to talk about. But I'm going to wrap it up.

Speaker 1: 1:04:46

Yeah, let's do that.

Speaker 2: 1:04:49

It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, and thanks for your time and sharing your insights.

Speaker 1: 1:04:55

Thank you, Martin. Thank you for the invitation. It's a pleasure to me to actually speak with you all the time.