ESS Design Services
Lighting and Decor
The aesthetics of a working environment have a much greater effect than many people realise. Obviously, a room needs to be comfortable enough to avoid fatiguing the occupants, but beyond that it all becomes a bit hit and miss.
Experience suggests that for creative work, the best studios are the ones which are just not quite comfortable in terms of decor and lighting.
We are hoping in the near future to be collaborating with the interior design and neuropsychology departments of a UK university, to determine which colours, textures and visual forms enhance activity in the creative centres of the brain, but in the mean time we have to content ourselves with an awareness of what seems to work and what doesn't.
Having said that, we still remember that we don't have to live with it when it's finished, and you do, so we will always work with you, to wheedle out of you what you really want the room to be like.
Lighting in control rooms sits at the interface between the aesthetic and the technical. On the one hand, it has to set the mood of the room so as to assist the creative process, but on the other, you need to be able to read the equipment legending, the meters, and the LCD screens without looking twice. Lights over the console have to be positioned so that neither the knobs nor the engineer's head cast deep shadows. Lights on the racked equipment must similarly not cast sharp shadows, nor glare off the LCDs.
The facility to vary the lighting level is essential, either by dimmers or by means of multiple switched circuits. Service work and wiring invariably require lighting levels which would be totally unsuited for long sessions.
The way a domestic dimmer switch works involves switching the lamp on and off 100 times a second, and this tends to cause a horrendous buzz on all nearby audio equipment.
Studio and control room dimming should ideally be done with variable auto-transformers