The changing perspective of daylight design to face the challenge of climate change

From the history of human civilization and development of architecture, it is evident that for most of the periods daylight was the leading choice of people and researchers for building illumination, except for a very short period of 50 years (1920 - 1970) in-between. The argument for daylighting has changed in different era, from the one and only source of light to energy efficient source, from healthy source of light to, again unique source of light to stop generation of fossil fuel GHG-emitting energy. The vast campaign for daylight building was started to save energy, but later it was proven that sometimes daylight itself causes extreme cooling load to the building more than the savings from artificial light. Therefore, improper and outthought addition of daylight may cause harm rather than targeted benefit. Now, the uppermost argument and interest for daylighting is its encouraging acceptability to occupants’ health, comfort, performance and satisfaction. Due to the accelerated climate change in future, failure to protect the buildings from UVR from sunlight, can go the other way and could be a threat on human health and wellbeing. This paper presents, how the design philosophy of daylight has changed/ updated with time. The purpose of this paper is, learning from past, highlight the added agendas of climate change for daylight designers and researchers, so that each and every solution and decision of daylight design will not only meet the current requirements and strategy but also fit in future episode.