Designing Lighting for Wellbeing: A Comparison of the Emotional versus Physiological Impact for People Living with Dementia from a Wellbeing Perspective

Interior lighting environments are an integral part of everyday life, but often we pay little attention to the spectral composition of the lights as we monotonously switch them ‘on’ and ‘off’. However light has a huge impact on not only our vision but on our body clocks. The variation in intensity and wavelength of incident lighting at different times of the day helps to control our mood, rest-activity patterns and sleep-wake cycles. For people living with dementia, this regularity of the body clock is often absent. Therefore learning to incorporate this knowledge into lighting design while maintaining the user’s comfort is critical to help support their wellbeing. This research discusses the design of a study which aims to compare the emotional vs physiological impact of lighting as a means to inform lighting design for the ageing generation and people living with dementia. The authors propose an open and closed interview structure which weights the importance of different aspects of lighting from the perspective of people living with dementia. The responses are then compared to the ‘current guidelines’ which report on lighting to support the body clock. The final outcome then provides an analysis of how to integrate both evidence-based lighting for
wellbeing while maintaining the comfort and sense of environment for the end users.