Request Expert

Expert's thought leadership encompasses the following areas within architecture: Acoustics, Audio and Visual, Daylighting, Lighting, Thermal Comfort, Indoor Air Quality and Occupancy Research. His expertise in Product Development includes Acoustics, Audio and Visual, Lighting and Vision, Thermal Comfort, Consumer Research, Sound Quality Studies, and Visual Quality Studies. His forensics expertise includes each of the above fields, as well as Accident Analysis and Reconstruction, where he has provided expert witness services in approximately 60 cases, which have pertained to Auto, Pedestrian, Retail and Recreation. His expertise applies to Design for Disabilities -- Perceptual and Cognitive -- Aging, Dementia, Autism, PTSD, ADHD, SPD, Deafness, and Blindness.

Natural and artificial lighting provide light to see visual tasks, yet few designers or researchers consider the characteristics of the visual system of their work. The most important aspects of lighting relate to how the performance of the visual system is affected by visual adaptation and age related visual performance, as well as glare, reflectance, gloss and other forms of visual interference.

Expert has been a leader in developing visual task solutions in architecture and product development which achieves higher visual task performance and lower visual stress. Expert has a 38-year-old consulting and testing laboratory working in the corporate product development research and in architectural design. The firm works in the disciplines of acoustics, audio, video, lighting, day-lighting, visual performance, thermal environment, and human factors.

In the research field, Expert provides design, research, and testing to many of the largest manufacturers in the United States in both the analytical measurement of the performance of their products (acoustic, visual, thermal, usability) and in perceptual assessment of the perceived benefits of their products. Two areas of focused research are lighting for visual inspection and sound quality studies for product manufacturers.

In the architectural field, Expert provides design, research, and testing in acoustics, audio, video, lighting, and daylighting for both architects and for corporate and institutional clients. He has been involved with clients nation-wide. This includes the design of lighting systems for entire building projects (both indoor and outdoor), and the design of specialized inspection and detail lighting for the performance of specific tasks. It also included the design of buildings for daylighting, so that daylight can penetrate deeply into work spaces to provide higher levels of occupant satisfaction.

Expert is also involved with the design of luminaires (fixtures) for specialized lighting applications, and has a specialty in evaluating the changes in visual performance due to lighting, thus impacting productivity.

Expert's laboratory has the most highly equipped multi-disciplinary laboratory of its type in North America. This lab has been visited by most of the Fortune 500 companies and has been the site of many national seminars. It contains separate laboratories for acoustics, lighting,daylighting and for thermal comfort. Expert was one of the first firms to measure ISO Thermal Comfort and has been using this as a benchmark for its pre and post occupancy surveys.

In 1971, Expert's laboratory began to provide services in architectural consulting including research, design and testing of acoustical and lighting performance for the "landscape office", now known as the open plan office. Since that early office involvement, Expert has completed projects in every commercial building type across the United States. His lab has specialized testing facilities, including an acoustic lab with reverberation rooms and an anechoic chamber, called "the quietest place on earth" in Guinness World Records.

Expert has decades of experience on projects such as industrial, institutional, commercial, educational, athletic, religious, civic, performing arts, corporate, studio and training facilities. He has recently been granted a patent on our Architectural Dynamics-TM technology, technology for controlling an environment for constant stimulation of the occupant.

From fundamental acoustical and vibration testing to advanced acoustical research, design and sound quality assessment, Expert has been a leading-edge resource since the early 1970's. Expert introduced the advanced measurement of consumer response into the realm of product and architectural acoustics in 1991 with the founding of the Sound Quality Working Group. Expert has also introduced such new acoustical measurement technologies as sound intensity and acoustic holography. Expert's lab facilities in acoustics include a full NVLAP lab with 3 reverberation chambers and an anechoic chamber. These are some of the quietest certified chambers in the world.

Known for advancing American industries' concept of sound quality, Expert has impacted both the acoustical engineering and perceptual market research disciplines. Annual training seminars in sound quality analysis are conducted for the engineering and marketing staffs of numerous Fortune 500 companies. Our work has strong impacted many industries, from autos and motorcycles to
appliances, tools, lawn products, aircraft, medical products and architectural products.

Energy efficient lighting often comes at the cost of poorer lighting quality. Expert has pioneered the development of high-visual quality, low-energy consumption lighting for many major industries. Many projects in architecture are now seeking LEED certification, and yet the owners and designers of these projects often do not know that LEED has little to do with building quality. Expert has fostered the concept of having building performance and occupancy quality standards which will assure that energy efficient buildings are also high quality buildings for their occupants. He has presented these findings at national sustainability conferences and published them broadly.

Environmental noise exposure in the United States comes from the OSHA regulatory system. OSHA's limits allow profound hearing loss outside of the speech range and accept significant loss inside the speech range. Expert has developed many hearing conservation programs which employ a zero hearing lost criteria more commonly used in European countries. This is often achieved with modest expense by a series of user practices in the typical plant.

He has completed many noise control projects for environmental and interior applications, and he has some of the most advanced testing systems available for complex assessment and resolution of noise problems, including full frequency environmental analyzers and sound intensity systems.

Expert's laboratory is one of the most advanced measurement and research labs in the United States dealing with analytical and subjective assessment of illumination and luminance level. They deal with both physical and psycho physical evaluations for any lighting project, especially those with difficult visual tasks and high visual stress. He has developed patented methods of assessing visual task inspection in industry and he has developed advanced lighting standards for application to most building types. He has provided many advanced assessments of industrial visibility, saving many our clients millions of dollars in reduction of visual quality errors.

He has also done extensive research on outdoor lighting, including the development of street lighting standards for a major American city. He has also assessed many cases of visual accidents, determining the importance of visual performance and the difficulty of the visual scene.

Has consulted with the City of Minneapolis, City of Richfield on arcraft noise at Mpls-St. Paul International Airport. Has also completed building projects at O'hare Intl. and at Mpls-St. Paul International.

He has also provided the first full frequency studies at a major American airport to demonstrate the disparity between dBA based FAA measurements and actual measurements of peak aircraft events, and he has employed these measurements in the development of superior noise attenuation standards for major building projects.

Expert has been involved with advanced work in lighting research, including the development of automotive inspection lighting systems. Color and finishes are often part of the visual task matrix, and he have long been involved with color, including CRI, as a result of visual performance and visual preference. His group has the only Visual Performance Lab in private industry in the US.




Noise Dosimetry is the measurement of actual noise exposure of an individual working in industry. He has used dosimetry as a part of industrial noise analysis for over 30 years.

He provides PMR (Perceptual Market Research) & POP(Perceptual Occupant Programming) or pre-verbal quantitative subjective research to many Fortune 500 firms and architectural design firms. His lab is the only multi-sensory provider in the U.S. This testing employs demographically recruited subjects for visual quality, sound quality and usability quality juries. These non-opinion based studies measure aspects of the respondents' feelings and associations which they are not consciously aware of, and are highly predictive of user satisfaction with future products and environments.

He has worked with Fortune 500 companies on visual inspect and and inspection lighting programs, including Ford, Harley, Whirlpool, and others. He holds patents in this field and has the only Visual Performance Lab in consulting use in the United States. Our consulting work in visual inspection is covered by an extensive patent related to testing, viewing and resolving visual inspection problems. Most factories are lit with high glare lighting which causes visual degradation soon after arrival at the plant. By changing to higher quality lighting, significant improvements in productivity can result, often equivalent to the entire value of the building.

Expert has been involved in about 50mm sq. ft. of open plan office consulting in all 50 states in acoustics, lighting, daylighting, thermal comfort, IAQ., occupancy research. Expert has conducted sound quality product research for Harley Davidson, Whirlpool, Black and Decker, Cessna Aircraft, Kohler, etc., Herman Miller, and Sonare.He has conducted Visual Quality research for Whirlpool, Microsoft, Polaris, Burger King, Architectural Projects, etc. Expert has undertaken legal consulting on 30+ visibility cases requiring both evaluation and technical measurement. Expert has done laboratory testing in acoustics for hundreds of manufactured products, many of which have included remediation testing and development of new standards.