Hospitality Design - November 2017 - 89

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fred maxik
By Matt Dougherty
Photography by Oscar Hidalgo and Laura B. Kozlowski

BRIGHT IDEA

One man's mission to make lighting smarter

As a kid, Fred Maxik found himself looking at
NASA's image of earth at night, where "light
was pretty much the only thing you could
see from space," he explains. As he got older,
Maxik realized that the "light we were seeing
in space was completely wasted because it
was light that we weren't using." And so he
asked himself, "How do I make that science
more efficient and then redirect it?" Some
decades later, Maxik started his career in the
consumer electronics industry, working for
the likes of Sansui and Onkyo with products
that used LEDs merely for backlighting. "I
started looking [into] how we could take these
solid-state devices and make lighting systems
out of them," he says. That led him to start
West Warwick, Rhode Island-based Lighting
Science Group in 2001, which currently
designs lightbulbs with human wellness as
its top priority and, coincidentally, does a lot
of work with NASA on biologically corrected
lighting to help astronauts sleep better. It all
came from Maxik's self-imposed "commitment
to sustainability," he says.
A hallmark is his HealthE Genesis
Dynaspectrum LED luminaire, a sleek,
minimalistic table lamp that changes its
emittance according to the time of day, with
the patented GoodDay spectrum heightening
alertness and focus through daylight hours,
and the GoodNight spectrum promoting
better sleep, both achieved by appropriately
regulating the body's natural circadian
rhythm. Additionally, sensors check air
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quality to improve breathing, allergies, and,
ultimately, mood and sleep. It's so effective
that NASA is putting a customized version
on its International Space Station (astronauts
there experience 16 sunrises and sunsets every
24 hours) and other space shuttles, which
was an entirely different challenge. Not every
material can survive in space, and those that
do need to be able to withstand certain levels
of radiation, he explains.
Yet, it showed "what was possible to the
industry," Maxik says. Now he's developing
the L Bar, a thin, 4-foot-long LED troffer that
weighs less than a pound and uses 95 percent
less material than fixtures it would replace,
leaving a minute footprint in the process.
His products have struck a chord with
consumers: He's selling upward of one million
lamps a month-for homes, hospitals, and
even hospitality. "Part of what [hotels] are
selling is sleep and relaxation," he points
out. "You're spending so much on a bed, for
pillows, for shades all to help people sleep well
at night, and then [you're] putting a lightbulb
in the fixture next to the bed that's
actually detrimental to their sleep."
His work did somewhat fulfill a
childhood dream-a visit inside the
space shuttle that was on the pad
ready to launch. His reaction: "This
is incredible. What am I doing
here? How did I get here?" hd

1. Humanscale
collaborated with the
Lighting Science Group
to create a prototype of
their existing task light
the Element Vision with
biorhythmic lighting
as an opportunity
to showcase the
technology.

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