D-LITE Database of Light – Interacting Technologies for Envelopes

Even though a large variety of innovative façade technologies has been developed to refine the control of solar radiation and increase the amount of useful natural illumination, their effective implementation in buildings is still uncommon. Increasing the awareness of designers to their existence and facilitating an understanding of their potential therefore appears as a priority. An important step in that direction is to offer ways to make the search and selection process more intuitive. This project proposes a way to address this issue with a new database format. It focuses on the generation of visual strategies to express technical aspects and performance data with a more intuitive and architecturally based language, adapted to a designer’s needs and respectful of a realistic design process. The project takes shape as a freely accessible online database of light-interacting technologies for envelopes, which will be available at www.d-lite.org to provide an efficient meeting space for professionals in the field.

The idea of this project came up when in 2003 I started my research work Glass + Light: Towards a Photoconductive Envelope and I realized that there was not any compilation of light-control techniques, in one document, and expressly developed as a tool for architects. It has been possible to start working seriously on it as part of my research studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and it has been fully developed in collaboration with Marilyne Andersen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Daylighting Laboratory.

Throughout the cataloguing process 160 products have been selected and over 100 companies have been contacted. This project has generated a strong national and international collaborative framework with scholars, industry and the building design community.

A paper on d-lite's concept and development was presented at the annual PLEA Conference (Passive and Low Energy Architecture) being held from 22-24 October 2008 at the University College Dublin in Ireland.