Queen Elizabeth School, Wakefield

Litetask’s lighting design team ‘LITEideas’ led by Colin Clark was approached by Adam Hickling of Yorkshire based Interior Designers, Innsight Design, to produce a lighting design for the refurbishment of the ‘Junior’ school of Queen Elizabeth Grammar School , Wakefield.

Our brief was to produce an innovative, aesthetically pleasing, modern and energy efficient lighting design using high quality lighting that was also functional for teaching and learning environments. Our design team included the latest lamp and luminaire technology that was available to ensure that the final design was ‘the best they could get’. One of the innovative luminaires included was the Clearvision ‘Virtual’ Daylight luminaires that included Philips MASTER PL-L lamps and DSI dimming control gear.

We know that the colour of light is directly related to our moods, attention level and concentration ability. Artificial daylight is much whiter than normal, with a higher blue content, which has greater stimulation effects of the brain.

All of us experience a daily natural rhythm of hormones in the bloodstream, which it is important to maintain good health. However to do this it is important to suppress the sleep hormone, Melatonin, during the day. Daylight, or light that is rich in blue wavelengths, is far more effective at suppressing Melatonin than standard fluorescent light. It is important that workplace lighting should support this natural process. For nearly 100 years lighting practice was based on visual considerations, however we now understand much more about the importance of the non-visual impact of light and hence our choice of Virtual Daylight for this project.

The design, produced by Liteideas Lighting Designer, Jo White, and Liteideas Manager, Colin Clark, also included the latest lighting control systems to enable the teaching staff to switch, dim and ‘scene set’ the light levels within the class rooms. This is an important factor in the ability to minimize the energy consumption of the system. All the lighting was designed to be controlled by daylight linking, presence detection and remote control.

In the corridor we wanted to create a ‘wow’ factor with a much younger feel and lively mood; it gave us the opportunity to introduce some colour. To achieve that atmosphere we used colour changing cold cathode from the UK’s leading and award winning cold cathode manufacturer, Kemps Neon.

The results can be seen for yourself in the photographs. Another project well done by Liteideas that not only met the original brief but exceeded expectations, it was delivered on time and within budget.