On Thursday **8 October 2026**, Recolight brought specifiers, manufacturers and policy makers to the Minster Building in the City of London for **Circular Lighting Live 2026**. The theme was *Vision 2040: Restructuring the lighting sector*: standards and legislation, new business models, remanufacturing and less waste. Dean Skira's talk added a question that sits upstream of all of them: how much light does a street actually need?

What if we calculated how much light a street actually needs before choosing the luminaire?

Product first, the way it has always been

For decades, the industry has paid too little attention to where light actually goes. Public lighting is still implemented the same way: search a catalogue, specify a luminaire, calculate, install. The calculation usually looks only at the road surface between two poles, while the sidewalks, facades and windows around it get whatever the chosen optic spills there. Similar luminaires end up on very different streets, and unnecessarily wide beams send light, energy and money where nobody needs them.

Dean's answer was to turn the order around. Taman starts with the urban environment, not the product:

Nobody picks glasses off a shelf before an eye examination. The prescription comes first, and the lenses are made to it. Dean described Taman the same way: an eye doctor for the city at night that **diagnoses** where light is needed, **identifies** where it is excessive, and **prescribes** the photometric distribution. The luminaire is then made, or matched, to that prescription.

Dean also showed where this leads industrially. The Taman Automatic Lens Configurator (TALC) turns a target curve into a lens and LED matrix that can be built as a module, so a luminaire can be manufactured, or remanufactured, for the light one street needs: lower production and maintenance costs, and less waste.

The rest of the day looked at the sector as a whole: John McRae of Orms opened with the *Vision 2040* keynote, Sabine De Schutter of Studio De Schutter spoke about upcycling in *Beyond Fast Lighting*, and the panels covered EPDs, circular economy legislation, remanufacturing and AI-assisted design. Requirements-first design fits that agenda: the most circular luminaire is one that delivers exactly the light a place needs and nothing it doesn't.

Light where it’s needed. Darkness where it belongs.

Thank you to Recolight for the invitation, and to everyone who came to the talk and stayed for the conversation.

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Requirements first: Taman at Circular Lighting Live, London

"The luminaire must not emit above 180° downward." You hear it in tenders, in council meetings and in product sheets, and it means one thing: the whole lower hemisphere, **nothing above the horizontal plane**, which is 90° measured from the nadir (straight down). That single line is what most light pollution laws actually require. It has several names.

80° and 70°: where glare and trespass live

Light just below the horizon does not reach the sky directly, but it is the light that blinds drivers and enters bedroom windows. That is why EN 13201-2 (Annex A, table A.1) limits intensity in the 70° to 90° band. Per 1,000 lumens of luminaire output: **G*4** allows 500 cd at 70°, 100 at 80°, 10 at 90°; **G*5** allows 350, 100 and 10; **G*6** allows 350, 100 and 0. A narrower cone, "160°" (nothing above 80°) or "150°" (nothing above 75°), is not required by any law we know of. It is a design choice, and it is where the real difference between a catalogue luminaire and a calculated one shows up.

Why the law stops at 90° and design should not

A catalogue offers a handful of distributions. To meet the road class at its weakest point with a fixed curve, the designer turns the flux up, and the surplus spills into the 70° to 90° band, onto facades and into windows. Calculating the distribution from the street reverses that: the curve is shaped to put the required luminance on the road and the pavement, so the intensity near the horizon is whatever the road needs, and nothing more. On a residential street in Pula that was **45.8% less luminous flux** for the same M4, P3 and P1 classes, with 0% uplight by construction.

Light where it is needed. Darkness where it belongs.

What the road lighting norm covers, and the three things it leaves out: colour temperature, upward light and an upper limit.

EN 13201, explained

Design the distribution a street needs, then choose the luminaire that delivers it.

Taman beta is open

What full cutoff actually means: 90°, 80° and 70°

In April 2026, *Nature* published a decade of night-time satellite data, analysed by Christopher Kyba's team at Ruhr University Bochum. Between 2014 and 2022 the light Earth sends into space at night grew by about **2% a year, 16% in total.** China and India brightened with urban growth. Europe dimmed by 4%. **France fell 33%.**

No new technology. Thousands of French municipalities switch their street lighting off in the middle of the night, and a 2018 decree set the rest: warm light of at most 3000 K, strict limits on upward light, and a January 2025 deadline to remove luminaires that throw more than half their light at the sky. A 2025 ground study by Rolf Buhler and colleagues, calibrated at 139 sites, confirms it: artificial illuminance in the middle of the French night is down **23%** compared with 2013-2018.

In 2023, *Science* analysed 51,000 observations from citizen scientists in the Globe at Night project. The sky people actually see brightened by about **9.6% a year** between 2011 and 2022, 6.5% in Europe and 10.4% in the United States. The satellite sensor is nearly blind to blue light, and blue is where white LEDs emit most, so cities that swapped sodium lamps for LED look dimmer from orbit while their sky gets brighter from the ground.

LED conversions cut street lighting energy by 50 to 70%. On their own they cut light pollution nowhere. What moved the French number was design: how much light goes in, where it points, and whether it stays on when nobody needs it. Those decisions are taken before the first luminaire is ordered, which is exactly where Taman starts. On a residential street in Pula, calculating the light the street needs first meant **45.8% less luminous flux** for the same lighting classes.

Read the study

Design the light a street actually needs, before choosing the luminaire.

Light pollution in 2026: the world got 16% brighter, France 33% darker

Croatia has one of the stricter light pollution laws in the EU, and most of its obligations fall on cities and municipalities. This is what the **Law on Protection from Light Pollution** (NN 14/2019, in force since April 2019) and its regulation (*Pravilnik*, NN 128/2020) require. Article numbers are given so every claim can be checked against the source.

Article 5 of the law defines an ecologically acceptable luminaire: **0.0% of its light above the horizontal plane** and a colour temperature of **at most 3000 K**. Protected areas tighten that to **2200 K**. Decorative lighting may point upward only if the light stays within the object it lights.

The Pravilnik (Article 5) divides territory into zones from **E0** (dark sky parks, strict reserves) through **E1** (rural, protected areas), **E2** (residential), **E3** (industrial, traffic) to **E4** (urban centres with intense night activity). Each municipality assigns the zones in its lighting plan, and the zone sets the limits:

Reduced lighting starts at midnight and lasts **at least three hours** (Article 7). Road lighting drops to the curfew values in Annex III, decorative lighting is cut by at least half or switched off, landscape lighting goes off (Articles 10, 14, 24).

The road lighting norm says how much light a road needs (class M for traffic, P for pedestrians). The law says how much may escape, in which colour, and when it must go down. Starting from a catalogue luminaire usually means over-lighting to cover the weakest point of the road, and that surplus is what the law limits. Starting from the street removes the conflict: Taman calculates the distribution that meets the class at minimum flux, with 0% uplight by construction. In Pula that was **45.8% less luminous flux** for the same classes.

One reminder that a zone on paper is not protection: Petrova gora, Croatia's first International Dark Sky Park, lost its status after a telecommunications tower with bright signalling lights was built inside it. Only Vrani kamen on Papuk remains.

Zakon o zaštiti od svjetlosnog onečišćenja (NN 14/2019) and Pravilnik o zonama rasvijetljenosti (NN 128/2020).

Read the law

We design to EN 13201 and the light pollution law in one pass, for a street or a whole municipality.

Working on a lighting plan?

Croatia's light pollution law: what cities must do by 2032

We built Taman around a simple but uncomfortable idea: much of the light we put into our cities should never have been there in the first place. Today that idea received an important recognition.

The **Taman Urban Lighting Design Platform** has been selected for the **2026 IES Industry Progress Report**. The Illuminating Engineering Society's Industry Progress Report Committee recognizes the submission as "a unique and significant advancement to the art and science of lighting".

For five years we have been developing a different approach to urban lighting. Instead of starting with a luminaire and asking where to put it, Taman starts with the city itself and calculates where light is actually needed, how much is needed, and where it should not go.

The objective is not simply greater efficiency. It is optimization: meeting the lighting standards while reducing unnecessary luminous flux, energy consumption, light spill and light pollution. Replacing an inefficient luminaire with an efficient LED is progress. Using only the light we actually need is the next step.

Being recognized by the IES is a milestone for the whole team, and a strong confirmation that the way we design urban lighting can, and should, evolve. We are just getting started.

Learn more about the IES and its annual Industry Progress Report.

Illuminating Engineering Society

Apply for early access and see what optimization, not just efficiency, does to a street.

Taman selected for the 2026 IES Industry Progress Report

LEDs promised to transform our cities. They use less energy, last longer, and give us far more control over intensity, colour and timing. And yet light pollution keeps growing. In a recent **IEEE Spectrum** feature, "We're squandering LEDs' potential to save our night skies", author Paul Bogard argues that bad decisions have turned an efficient technology into a driver of light pollution.

Many cities have simply swapped old luminaires for more efficient ones, one for one, without asking how much light is actually needed, where it should be placed, and where darkness should remain. When light becomes cheaper to run, the temptation is to use more of it. The result is efficient over-lighting: lower bills, brighter skies.

Efficiency alone is not enough. It answers the question "how do we produce this light with less energy?" without ever asking whether this light should exist at all.

Responsible urban lighting needs a different first step: understanding the environment before selecting the product. At Taman we believe the better lighting decisions have to come before procurement, using data and optimization to determine the right light distribution for each specific place. Then, and only then, choose the luminaire that delivers it.

Because the goal is not to illuminate more efficiently. It is to illuminate more intelligently.

"We're squandering LEDs' potential to save our night skies" by Paul Bogard, 20 July 2026.

Read the IEEE Spectrum feature

Apply for early access and design the light a place actually needs.

Efficient is not the same as intelligent

Taman has been nominated for a **Build Back Better Award** in the lighting category. For us, this recognition is about more than technology. It validates a simple but urgent idea: outdoor lighting should no longer begin with choosing a luminaire. It should begin with understanding exactly where light is needed, how much is enough, and where darkness must remain.

In their nomination announcement, the Build Back Better Awards describe Taman as software that looks set to boost the remanufacturing of street lights by offering bespoke LED arrays for each light, in a bid to minimise light pollution and energy use. Their summary of what the platform does:

That last point is the one we are proudest of. Taman can design the LED array and the associated optics for a specific location, so even an individual light can have a bespoke array built for exactly where it stands.

We are proud of this nomination and grateful to everyone who has supported the journey so far. A new era is here, and we are ready.

Apply for early access and try the platform on one of your own projects.

Taman nominated for a Build Back Better Award

For more than three decades, lighting designers have fought light pollution with better optics, better shielding and more efficient sources. The progress is real, yet the glow above most cities keeps growing. On 19 June 2026, in a featured session at **IALD Enlighten Europe** in Paris, Dean Skira argued that the industry has been asking the wrong question. It keeps asking which luminaire to buy. The question that decides light pollution is how much light a street actually needs, and where. Answer that first, and the luminaire follows.

We've been doing the same thing for decades. Why should we expect a different result?

Most of the public debate about light pollution is about architectural lighting: monuments, facades and landmarks. They are visible, so they get the attention. But they are a small fraction of a city's light at night. Pula, Dean's hometown, has roughly twenty significant historic structures. It also has about **220 kilometres of roads and nearly 8,000 streetlights.**

Street lighting is easy to overlook precisely because it is everywhere. It shapes public safety, pedestrian comfort, traffic, energy bills, maintenance budgets, wildlife and the character of a city after dark, and it touches nearly every resident every single night. That scale is exactly why it deserves far more of the profession's creative energy.

Dean first ran into the question in the early 1990s, wondering whether his own profession was quietly contributing to environmental damage. Soon after, designing a waterfront promenade in Pula, he specified full-cutoff optics, one of the earliest installations of its kind in Europe. The principle has not changed since: control the light where it is needed and keep it from spilling anywhere else.

One recent project shows what that principle demands in practice. Skira's studio was asked to redesign the lighting of Pula's Roman Arena: white light for everyday viewing, dynamic colour for concerts, theatrical lighting for performances and emergency lighting, all on one of Croatia's most important monuments. The constraints: only six existing poles, nothing attached to the ancient stone, no new foundations, and a Croatian regulation that forbids architectural light from reaching nearby residential windows.

Floodlighting was never an option. The answer was carefully engineered projection optics and custom gobos that shape the light to the stone itself, verified in full-scale mock-ups. The Arena is lit, and almost nothing reaches the surrounding buildings. Preservation, the client's brief and environmental responsibility turned out to be compatible after all.

The Arena solved an architectural problem, but it reinforced a larger point. The industry keeps optimizing luminaires instead of optimizing cities. The workflow has barely changed in decades: pick a fixture from a catalogue, drop it into calculation software, check the standard, done. **The fixture drives the process.**

Taman reverses that sequence. It starts with a digital model of the street. AI-assisted optimization evaluates the roadway geometry, sidewalks, building setbacks, traffic and pedestrian patterns and the applicable lighting standard, and only then calculates the ideal photometric distribution. Selecting, or manufacturing, the luminaire is the last step, not the first. Every street deserves its own optimized lighting solution instead of sharing a handful of standard distributions.

Thank you to the IALD community and to everyone who attended the session and continued the conversation afterwards. Randy Reid, editor of *designing lighting*, later captured the talk in the feature "Beyond Full Cutoff: Dean Skira and Taman Want to Optimize Cities, Not Fixtures".

"Beyond Full Cutoff" by Randy Reid, pages 48-49.

Read the feature in designing lighting

Urban planners, municipalities, lighting designers, engineers and manufacturers: apply for early access and try a different approach on your own project.

Optimize cities, not fixtures: Taman at IALD Enlighten Europe

For decades, the lighting industry has followed the same workflow: **select luminaires → calculate → install → adjust.** At **Light + Building** in Frankfurt, during the **Future Forum** by VLD.Community, Dean Skira challenged that logic.

Instead of starting from products, the process begins with context - the space, the requirements, and the exact light that is needed. Only once the ideal light distribution is known does the search for a matching luminaire begin. It is a reversal of the traditional workflow: design driven by need, not by product availability.

Taman is an AI-driven platform that optimizes urban lighting **before a luminaire is selected.** You input a 3D model of an area - anything from a single street segment to a broader urban zone - and the system applies the relevant standards and generates the ideal light-distribution curves for that site. Then, and only then, it searches a catalogue for the closest real product.

While Taman is a design tool, its reach goes further: architects, urban planners, municipalities and manufacturers. Cities could predict energy consumption across districts, engineers could streamline compliance, and manufacturers could use optimized data to develop more targeted optics. The result is less spill, less waste, and more precision.

Dean closed with a linguistic detail behind the name. In Croatian, *taman* has a dual meaning: it can mean “dark,” but it can also mean “just right.” That duality is exactly the balance the software aims for - enough light where people need it, and darkness where it belongs.

The conversation is already moving. In the April 2026 issue of *designing lighting*, John R. (Randy) Reid reflects on this shift and the need to rethink how we design light in cities.

We’re opening access to a limited number of users who want to test the platform before the official release.

Taman is now in beta

“Dean Skira Challenges the Lighting Design Process” - designing lighting, April 2026, page 74.

Read the full feature

Next stop: Dean will present **“Light Where It’s Needed, Darkness Where It Belongs: Rethinking Urban Street Lighting”** at IALD’s Enlighten Europe in Paris on **Friday, 19 June 2026.**

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