Versatility. This year’s slate of Product Innovation Award (PIA) honorees demonstrates that, practically speaking, anything is possible when it comes to fulfilling a designer’s most exacting, rigorous, or fantastical lighting needs. Within the past decade or so, lighting manufacturers have developed extraordinary command of solid-state lighting technology. Today, a single LED luminaire capable of delivering multiple lumen outputs, color temperatures, and distributions is hardly a rarity, but rather a necessity in the flexible, human-centric, and multifunctional spaces that are increasingly common to commercial environments.
Imagine the design possibilities as you browse the following pages presenting the 45 PIA honorees. The solutions are grouped loosely in the general product categories—linear lighting, downlights, decorative, and so on—but don’t limit your ideas of their use as such. Multiple solutions can morph across different categories and use cases. For example, several honorees can brave extreme conditions outdoors but also look right at home in a high-end interior or interstitial space to support a consistent aesthetic from, as Luminis put it, “corner to cube.”
Never content with the status quo, the manufacturers behind these honorees will continue to push the capabilities of LEDs. How many more lumens can one watt deliver? Can a fixture be lighter, smaller, or easier to disassemble for maintenance or recycling? What new form factors will both complement lasting trends and blaze new ones?
One promising area of growth in this year’s honorees is the progress that increasingly more lighting manufacturers are making toward a more sustainable and circular economy. Many entrants shared how their products are utilizing more efficient or lightened packaging strategies to reduce transport costs; preserving dark skies; integrating salvaged, waste, or recyclable materials; and offering reclamation programs for a solution’s end of life.
We look forward to seeing more of these strategies in the coming years. If one thing is certain, the lighting industry has no shortage in its ability to adapt, experiment, and revolutionize.
2023 Product Innovation Awards honorees
To see Architectural SSL's 2023 PIA honorees, click the categories below:
