Retail lighting and textiles: Designing a lighting probe set

This paper investigates the interaction between retail lighting and textiles to provide retailers and lighting designers with a set of physical textile objects that can be used to test the visual effect of a lighting setting. Since the relationships between optical aspects of lighting–textiles interactions and subjective qualities associated with them have not been systematically investigated, we conducted two experiments to study those relationships. The first experiment concerned photometric measurements of textiles in order to categorize the reflectance types. The second experiment examined human observers’ judgments of a range of material-expressing qualities, such as shininess and softness, in two canonical types of lighting. The textiles for which the differences in those qualities were maximal were used in designing a lighting probe set.