Comments attributed to: Paul Smith, Head of Specification Sales, Häfele UK

Well-considered lighting has the ability to evoke many different reactions from us. Bright and vibrant installations can motivate, inspire and even enliven our mood. Those designed to have a more subtle impact can calm and relax us, enabling greater focus and tranquillity. Lighting is also integral to helping us effectively achieve any number of functions from socialising and working, to exercising or creativity.

Lighting can cause multiple emotional and physical responses, so how it is designed and installed is of particular importance for settings which welcome young people to play and learn – whether that’s a school or college, a museum or library.

Careful consideration must be paid to the practical elements of lighting solutions selected for such environments – for example, where to position them and what type of lighting to use – as they play a crucial role in the ways children engage and discover. Plus, we should take into account how lighting can be used to create an immersive experience when it’s adapted to complement wider design and colour schemes, or integrated with sound technology to facilitate different learning styles.

Although lighting alone serves to illuminate a space, as part of a wider design scheme, layering different lighting can achieve even more. For example, accent lighting highlights specific features within a room such as white boards or zones dedicated to different activities, while spotlights emphasise interesting objects and act as pathfinders. Task lighting – often in strip form – helps create more productive working areas, while ambient lighting can achieve a specific mood and make a space feel bigger or cosier.

Layering lighting better balances a room’s dimensions, improves spatial awareness and highlights a room’s most important assets, becoming critical to how an educational space operates, as well as how it looks and feels.

So intrinsic is lighting to the ways in which children interact with a space, that it is essential to consider it at the very earliest stages of crafting a room’s blueprint and theme, rather than seeing it as a bolt on. However, achieving a truly effective outcome when it comes to lighting requires the support of specialists and tailored services that put lighting central to educational design.

Häfele’s team of specification experts partner with architects and contractors creating education settings, to help bring their ambitions to life using lighting. Whether it’s a refit of an outdated school, or the development of a new space designed to accommodate modern learning styles, the Häfele team will embed themselves into a customer’s vision and recommend the best lighting products and services for their needs and budget.

Through Häfele’s Lighting Design Service, designers can submit room plans to the team of designers, who will, in turn, create bespoke lighting layouts on their behalf using the Loox and Nimbus lighting ranges. The team will work in partnership to understand the requirements of a space, creating a design which strikes a perfect balance between furniture lighting and other lighting elements, so they truly complement one another and put lighting at the centre of the space’s aesthetic.

When used in combination with Häfele to Order, the Lighting Design Service truly comes into its own. Created to support those working on either higher volume projects or in spaces that require made-to-measure components, Häfele to Order allows designers, planners and fit out teams to specify products to the exact size, quantity and finish, before they are cut, assembled, packaged, labelled and delivered to the requirements.

The right layout, layering and placement of lighting can make the all-important difference to how a space works and when it comes to education, it’s something that should be taken seriously from day one of a design scheme.

Häfele’s lighting and ordering services are designed to support every level of the educational design supply chain, from the architect at initial consultation phase, to the installer delivering the fit out and, ultimately, the educators who benefit from offering their students an immersive, engaging and productive place to enjoy during the course of their studies.