Lightness of Touch: Light + Building Frankfurt 2018

“Connected – Secure – Convenient” is the motto of this year’s Light + Building. Every two years, the world’s leading trade fair for lighting, design and intelligent building technology presents product innovations and industry trends in the fields of lighting, electrical engineering and home and building automation. As the title reveals, this year’s fair will spotlight the networked building and our heightened need for convenience and security. These areas of current interest will be dealt with intensively in the framework of the fair’s two “top themes”: “The smartification of everyday life” and “Aesthetics and well-being in harmony”.

In the lighting product segment under “Aesthetics and well-being in harmony”, the fair will exhibit current design trends in the lighting market. Above all, the featured innovations put people and their personal needs at centre stage – as reflected in the currently relevant topic Human Centric Lighting. Modelled on the changes in natural light conditions over the course of the day, this technology imitates the effect on people of the natural phases of sunlight in order to improve health, performance capacity and well-being.

The digitisation of light, set in motion several years ago by the industry’s changeover from incandescent lightbulbs to LEDs, is accelerating. Lighting is being integrated in home automation and can be app-controlled, promising the user greater flexibility and convenience. In the area of LEDs, real strides have been made at the design level as well, where the focus is no longer exclusively on the design of lamps, but also on the qualities of the light itself. Reflection, shadows and the diffusion and colours of light are coming into play as manufacturers and designers work with light in all its facets, opening up new potentials. As a result, lighting technology is becoming ever more complex and powerful, in turn challenging designers to integrate it into new lighting concepts as invisibly as possible.

In the second “top theme” of the fair, “The smartification of everyday life”, the emphasis is on the networked building and the fields of electrical engineering and home and building automation. In recent years, technology and, with it, new possibilities have been developing rapidly. Decisive impetus for this surge comes from the wish for increased convenience, security and energy efficiency, along with advancing digital interconnection and, ultimately, demographic change.

Improving the energy efficiency of buildings plays a major role with regard to climate protection and the reduction of greenhouse gases today. Indeed, buildings’ energy needs account for the largest share of primary energy consumption, ahead of even transport and industry. The use of smart, interconnected room and building controls offers an effective way to counter this. For planners, however, this means integrating additional technology and actors. Building information modelling (BIM) has been established to allow interdisciplinary cooperation, enabling the different building trades to work in parallel on the planning of a project via a central database.

Not only are buildings and planning methods getting smarter. Cities, too, are becoming increasingly interconnected through digital technologies, and thus more intelligent. Accordingly, the smart city is expected to bring gains in efficiency and sustainability in the future, which is especially important against the background of growing urbanisation. The driving force behind this is the Internet of things (IoT), encompassing all technological elements which, by means of microchips, can be interconnected via the Internet and coordinated without human intervention. The sensors required for this networking are becoming ever smaller and more powerful, giving rise to a wealth of new products and applications.

Whether in the area of the smart home, the smart building, smart living or the smart city, the smartification process is advancing, opening up a future-oriented market. Light + Building offers a comprehensive overview of this development: from 18 to 23 March, under the motto “Connected – Secure – Convenient”, over 2,600 exhibitors will present pioneering technologies, intelligent and interconnected solutions and current design trends in the lighting market.

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