This year we will present the workshop and exhibition: Responsive Urban Lighting at the Media Architecture Biennale 2012 in Århus, Denmark
Responsive Urban Lighting Workshop
It is the goal of the workshop to develop and test design strategies for responsive urban lighting as part of the Media Architecture Biennale exhibition in Aarhus. By using thermo camera tracking techniques different occupancy patterns can be detected and utilized to drive 1:1 responsive lightings. These technologies allows the lighting to adapt to different situations such as walking, running, meetings, standing, sitting etc., presenting new challenges to an animated street light that adapt in a beautiful, safe and energy efficient way. But how do we design light behaviors in public spaces? And to what extend does the changing streetlight change our experience of the architectural as well as the social space?
During the one-day workshop participants will build and sketch multi-user response patterns for urban lighting. Though iterative studies using responsive architectural models and virtual simulations, the workshop participants will design and test different response strategies. The finalized results displayed on 5 light poles placed as a part of the Media Architecture Biennale exhibition in Aarhus. This allow us to observe and evaluate social, aesthetic and energy related qualities in everyday life situations. The workshop could be relevant fore people interested in sensor controlled environments, light designers, architects, interaction designers, programmers, city planners etc. We are interested in an interdisciplinary team with technologists and designers.
During September we will make two Skype meetings introducing the tools and techniques to the workshop participants, this would allow people with programming skills to engage in the design of the tools or features in responsive urban lighting software. To design oriented participants these meetings are the time to get a feeling of the creative boundary conditions presented by the technical framework.
We hope to make an interdisciplinary group where design and technical discussions can be merged into an engaging and challenging discussion. Programmers could have skills in Processing, vvvv, max/msp, processing, Python or c++ any of those.