user needs - agreeing a target lighting quality specification
In the special issue of Energy and Buildings collected papers summarising the work of this of this IEA research Task, Reinhart and Selkowitz describe how in 2002, a paper in Science (D.M. Berson, F.A. Dunn, M. Takao, Phototransduction by retinal ganglion
cells that set the circadian clock, Science 295 (2002) 1070–1073) identified a previously unknown direct connection between the eye and the circadian pacemaker within the brain that drives daily wake–sleep cycles. They suggest that "This emerging research field could establish new requirements for lighting buildings that are based on non-visual effects of light on humans. Such requirements might at times be higher than the minimum visual requirements that are currently stipulated in norms. Satisfying these new needs could become both an environmental burden, if met through electric lighting, or an opportunity, if satisfied through an increased use of daylight." They then introduce a paper by Webb and a paper by Galasiu and Veitch and intended to "frame the ongoing debate among designers, lighting manufacturers, and other stakeholders within the design community of how future lighting requirements could or should be accommodated."
software quality assurance
The daylight and lighting software validation/calibration web site published by Task 31 is the beginning of what could and should become an international standard for photon tracking / global illumination software. A proposal exists to convert this project from the current summary of the research into a fully interactive rendering Quality Assurance tool able to be used by all software rendering companies and graduate student projects. The proposal makes use of the semantic web and the internet to make Quality Assurance an integral part of every digital light simulation.
standardisation of building materials property specifications
BTDF documentation standardisation …
Simple systems for inclusion of non standard glazings into digital light rendering tools
user needs - understanding the client
Simple systems for communicating to clients the issues of glare and luminance contrast
annual simulations - minimum standards for reporting lighting simulations
Incorporation of simple year long calculations into light rendering software
annual simulations - standard skies
More work remains to be done for each location in the world to develop a reasonable approach to the balance between each of the 16 CIE skies so as to create a picture of a whole year’s lighting performance. The whole year dynamic simulation avoids this to some extent in that it is using a whole year's hour by hour solar and diffuse radiation data to construct an hour by hour record of daylight availability. However, even for hour by hour thermal simulation, there is increasngly a need to document how representative the weather file is of the climate being evaluated,
user needs - adaptive controls
Further development of adaptive controls to usable everyday systems
Design ideas worth pursuing

Benefits of Daylight

How to do daylighting in a world where so much is still unknown? .

The Australian IEA Research Task 31 participants have taken the work of this task and of IEA Task 21 and have produced an example of how it might be packaged for a particular climate and economy as A Road Map for designers.