Derrick's service to the South Australia Society stretches back over very many years. He represented the IES, along with the late W.R. (Bill) Nicholls, on the City Illumination Committee for the first Adelaide Festival of Arts way back in the early 1960's. He was convener of the first South Australian IES Meritorious Lighting Awards committee in the early 1960's. In 1968 he organised, in association with the IES National Convention held in Adelaide that year, the first Australian "Daylight and Sunlight in Buildings" conference over two days and this was extended to a third day when those attending requested more time to spend in practical work in his Building Science Laboratory and to view the large collection of books and international lighting magazines he had gathered together and put on display.

In more recent times he has been involved in IES committee work on Continuing Professional Development (CPD) where he has prepared a Progress Report relating to its introduction to the IES. He has re-written, with the help of a local South Australian committee, the IES Membership Guide which now includes a new clause which enables those who are skilled in lighting matters, but who have not attended a recognised lighting course, to present their knowledge and skills to an expert committee for evaluation and assessment. He has also been involved in IES Constitution Committee work as well as Editor for a time on CANDELA and Secretary to the South Australian Society.

Before his retirement (joke) in 1992 from academic service in the Department of Architecture at the University of Adelaide he represented Australia on the International Lighting Commission (CIE) on the daylighting committees of CIE Division 3 : Interior Lighting and Environmental Design. He was instrumental, in 1983, in getting an international committee established to measure daylighting around the world. That committee under his chairmanship established the first standards for daylighting measurement and included the encouragement of the creation and development of new items of equipment such the sky scanner, quality control of measurements, and led to calibration procedures for the international comparability of measured daylighting data. In July 1993 the International Daylight Measurement Year was announced at the CIE Congress held in Melbourne and subsequently this has become the International Daylight Measurement Programme (IDMP) with over twenty countries participating and contributing to the pool of available daylighting knowledge for different climates and weather conditions.

He is currently taking time off from IES Committee work to complete a monograph on the late Dr Albert Dresler, lighting engineer and doyen of the international fraternity of daylighting researchers of the 1950's and 1960's.

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