Creative Lighting Design in Non-Artistic Settings

This is a light in a restaurant that ShinShin took me to a few weeks ago. It caught my eye. I wasn't enthralled by it, I don't think it's immensely beautiful, or ingenious. I don't even know if it's making me feel comfortable eating here. But it did make me think about the role of lighting designers outside of theatre. Someone designed this. They had a purpose in designing it, a desired effect. And they sold it, or were hired by a business to make it a reality. There is an entirely different sort of art at work here than we have been focusing on. Some of us might not even have experienced the idea of a lighting designer before, or outside of theater. That makes me wonder if there are people around studying how to design lights that have no idea about their function in the theater. It's a nice feeling to know that you are connected to artists in other places in the world, in other businesses, doing things for completely different reasons than you are, but still using their brains and guts to create a thing to do a thing and get another thing. Artists are at work in everything, and artists are all around us, not just in the arts department of the college. I think this college has thousands more artists than many of us might bother to think about regularly.