Software for a room that won't hold still
Lighting platforms assume a fixed floor plan. Partitioning breaks that assumption: the operable walls move, so the relationship between rooms, zones, and devices is fluid. A single venue can host one 400-person gala in the morning and five breakout sessions in the afternoon.
As lead designer I framed the partitioned-area concept, pitched it at the 2023 User Advisory Group, iterated the information architecture through three major versions, and delivered the configuration flow across mobile, tablet, and desktop.
A physical system, made legible
Three forces shaped every screen, each a constraint the system had to honor, not a feature to bolt on.
A space that changes shape during the day
Partitioning divides large rooms into smaller areas with operable walls, so each room is lit on its own when closed and unified when open. It lives in hotel conference rooms, ballrooms, school cafeterias, and gymnasiums.
Rooms first, walls as relationships
The design bet was to model the space the way the people running it think about it, not the way the hardware is wired. Get the mental model right and the contact-closure plumbing disappears behind a floor plan anyone can read.
Three versions to one mental model
The IA converged left to right: from a technically-correct walls-first V1 users couldn't reason about, to a sub-areas-first hierarchy, to a consolidated wizard with live wall status.
Five guided steps, then it runs itself
The shipped desktop wizard takes a room from "Partitioned" to fully wall-aware, defining sub-areas, the walls between them, and the contact input that senses each one.
Open a wall. The rooms merge.
On tablet the shipped plan maps every chandelier, cove and zone to its sub-area, assign by tapping the floor. When walls open, their devices fall under one zone's control; scenes, occupancy and daylight all follow.
Commission on a phone, operate on the wall
An installer configures partitions on a phone at the panel; a venue manager runs the room from a wall-mounted tablet or the web. The same three-step model, sub-areas → walls → devices, scales to each screen.
A moving room, configurable once
The breakthrough wasn't a screen, it was deciding that rooms, not walls, should be the primary object, and letting the wall hardware fall behind a floor plan anyone can read.
