DesignLights Consortium Seeks Proposals to Assess and Characterize the LED Light and Wellness Commercial Lighting Market

March 16, 2021

The DesignLights Consortium (DLC) today issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) seeking consultant services to assess and characterize the commercial market for LED light and wellness products. The DLC will accept questions about the RFP until March 19, with proposals due by March 29.

“This market assessment comes as the DLC is in the midst of implementing new Solid-State Lighting Technical Requirements that encourage development and deployment of lighting that provides non-energy benefits such as improving end-user comfort,” DLC Executive Director and CEO Christina Halfpenny said. “We are confident this project will yield data to further inform our efforts to support products that improve the wellbeing and satisfaction of people in the built environment.”

The DLC is defining lighting for wellness as “optical radiation that stimulates the circadian, neuroendocrine and neurobehavioral systems in humans” as defined by the TM-18-18 publication from the Illuminating Engineering Society. The DLC Light and Wellness Market Assessment will focus on products designed and marketed to provide circadian lighting attributes such as differentiated spectral power distribution, color tuning to support different time-of-day protocols, optimized spatial distribution to increase vertical illuminance levels at the eye, and/or controllability that supports one or more of these attributes.

The project will cover the commercial office, education (K through higher education) and health care (including nursing and long-term care facilities) segments of the commercial lighting market. It does not include germicidal and antibacterial/antimicrobial lighting products, products marketed for light therapy, or product categories not included on the DLC’s Solid-State Lighting Qualified Products List (such as consumer- and residential-grade products).

Services sought through RFP include identification of both market trends and barriers related to light and wellness products for the next five years. Among the issues the DLC is seeking to better understand are how market trends intersect with energy efficiency and controllability; how market trends may have changed due to COVID-19 impacts; whether barriers differ among market segments; and if there are barriers specific to the distribution chain. Those and other questions will be answered in a final report in late August 2021.

Complete details of the proposed project, its scope, timelines, and RFP response requirements are on the DLC website. Questions should be emailed to DLC Chief Operating Officer, Stephen White, before 4 p.m. on March 19. The DLC will post answers on the DLC website on or before March 23. Bidders should submit their proposals via email by 4 p.m. on March 29. The DLC anticipates selection of a winning bidder on April 7, with a project start date of April 30.