Environments for Aging - Summer 2020 - 34

LISA WARNOCK
Director of housing interiors, LRS Architects (Portland, Ore.)

arly into her now 20-year career as an interior designer,
Lisa Warnock found her passion for the importance of
lighting in the built environment and its role in affecting the
physical, emotional, and mental well-being of inhabitants.
Recognizing that residents in memory care and assisted
living communities are most restricted in accessing natural daylight, she set out to improve the daily life of residents by incorporating lighting strategies that automatically distribute the proper color and output of light to improve
comfort and safety. Most recently, she's focused her
advocacy on tunable lighting to support circadian rhythms
and well-being. For a project at Capital Manor in Salem, Ore., Warnock and the design
team utilized large windows and skylights to fill the memory care community with daylighting, with tunable lighting in the common areas. Not overlooking the importance
of caregivers' well-being, she also applies these concepts to staff spaces to ensure
lighting supports staff, including those working night shifts. In addition to her design
work, Warnock is a member of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America
and served on the Lighting for the Aged and Partially Sighted Committee, where she
provided feedback on lighting code requirements for licensed care to make sure that
recommendations support residents as intended and make sense for the design community to implement correctly. In December 2019, she was promoted to director of
housing interiors at LRS, leading the multifamily and senior living interiors teams.

Environments for Aging: What sparked your passion for lighting design?
While earning my interior design degree, I took a great lighting design class. I really
enjoyed learning about the physical response we have to light, and it resonated and
stayed with me. I've always been sensitive to lighting, and it was interesting to learn
about the science of lighting and its physical effects on people. I received an internship
with my adjunct professor in the lighting firm where he worked and seriously considered
becoming a lighting designer. Ultimately, I decided to stay on the interior designer track
with a special emphasis on lighting to have more diverse work.

Why is lighting such an important element in the design of senior living
environments, in particular?

Oswego, Ore. The client was converting
a two-story assisted living building into
a ground-floor memory care and remodeled assisted living community. In Oregon,
memory care is restricted to the first floor,
so to achieve the desired design for that
first floor, we needed to excavate to create
more square footage. The owner challenged us to exceed the code-required
amount of windows and natural light.
We developed some creative solutions
and got a lot of daylight into the space,
but the community wanted to do more
to improve the light quality. At the time,
Chuck Archer, director of development for
The Springs Living, brought forth this cool
new idea he had heard about called "tunable lighting," aka circadian lighting. He
introduced us to Eunice Noell-Waggoner
and Robert Dupuy, experts in the subject
matter, and brought them into the project
to share their knowledge. I was so enthusiastic about tunable lighting that they
took me under their wing and have since
become both friends and mentors.

What's your vision for senior living
in the future?
I hope our industry embraces the WELL
Building Standard. It makes sense to design and develop buildings that make our
residents and staff healthier while spending so much of their time indoors. The fact
that WELL has embraced tunable lighting
as part of the requirements is a bonus for
me. I see our industry responding to this
in a big way once more is known about
the pilot program that's in development
for WELL in Senior Living.

How did circadian lighting become a part of your
work?
I was introduced to the concept in 2011 during the programming phase of a remodel for The Springs Living in Lake

EFAmagazine.com * Summer 2020

Capital Manor, Salem, Ore.

DAVID PAPAZIAN

The most important reason, in my opinion, is improved health
and well-being for the people living and working inside a space.
It's been proven that blue light exposure during sleep hours
disrupts critical hormone production and that this disruption
can lead to a whole host of negative health outcomes, such
as increased risk of cancer, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular disease. It's also been proven that exposure to higher
levels of light at certain intervals in the early morning improves
health and well-being, especially in seniors. Researchers and
lighting professionals are still trying to find the exact recipe for
success for the commissioning of tunable lighting systems.

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Environments for Aging - Summer 2020

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