HOW WE WORK
Our mission is to create healthy, engaging, and comfortable daylit spaces.
Our Philosophy
Our vision is to broaden the interpretation of sustainability in buildings beyond traditional energy-efficiency aspects, which have become dominant in the last few decades. Of its three pillars - namely social, environmental and economic -, our approach focuses first and foremost on humans, their well-being and their experience in buildings, which is ultimately the basis of everything: it is for their comfort and function that we use material and energy resources in buildings. Through an improved experience of its occupants - in terms of alertness, satisfaction, and cognitive performance - there is a high potential for large economic impacts from public health and productivity, while relying mostly on natural resources - the sun and the sky – with which we evolved.
In other words, we want to get back to the reason we build buildings in the first place: to serve human occupants.
OUR PROCESS
We work across all stages in the innovation process, from research to informed decision making.
01
RESEARCH
The value of our service relies first and foremost in the novelty of our research. At OCULIGHT, we’ve spent years exploring the impacts of daylight on human health, emotion, and well-being. Using experiments to collect data and algorithms to model and predict human-responses to light, our work has been broadly published and peer-reviewed by the international lighting community.
From fundamental research to commercial application, we are working to improve the understanding of daylight as an important factor in healthy indoor environments. This objective requires continuous development in not only our services, but in the research behind. OCULIGHT works with academic and industry partners to conduct new experiments, develop new models, and work to validate and improve our predictive methods.
02
INTEGRATE
The analysis we provide, developed over years of research and consulting, is supported by a package of highly interactive tools that allow us to assess and visualize daylight potential using models that predict the vitality, emotion, comfort, and task lighting in a given scene. To achieve this, our team has developed and continues to improve evidence-based models (from research) and computer-based simulation methods (software development) to predict the dynamic impacts of light on human responses based on over 15 years of research in this field.
Developing new models and metrics requires careful thought towards their integration in simulation-based workflows and visualization methods, therefore at OCULIGHT, we work closely with web designers and developers to improve the user experience of our data. This allows us to provide our clients with state-of-the-art knowledge via user-friendly tools that we are actively working to improve.
03
INFORM
The consulting we provide is most impactful in the schematic and design development phases when decisions about daylight integration are still ongoing, but our services can also be valuable after a building is complete, as a forensic assessment when problems emerge. This post-occupancy data can help to not only identify problems, but also to verify whether a building is functioning as it was designed.
In addition to our research and tool development skills, uur team has years of design and consulting experience working on architectural projects across a range of scales. As such, we are able to not only interpret the performance of daylight in models that we simulate, but we can also provide design services to recommend improvements that perform within the specific design intent of the project. This makes us uniquely positioned to offer full-service daylight consulting and design services.
Our Funding
Funding for our research and development has been provided in part by the EPFL, the Velux Stiftung Foundation (Grant #936), and the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant #153018).
The initial development of OCUVIS was funded by InnoSeed ENAC (Explorer and Venture Grants).