Presenting at LEDforum Brazil 17-18 August 2017
Collaboration with Diana Joels & Norah Imaz
The starting point for this presentation is a shared question between the three independent lighting designers: how can light contribute to make our nocturnal cities better?
In addressing this questions - regardless of the specific cities of urban settings in Israel, Spain and Brazil - all three designers share also a similar belief: the necessity of the development of human centric design responses to culturally shaped situations.
Along their independent trajectories, each of the designers have worked with the theme of lighting design for urban spaces, in different contexts and situations.
Hanan Peretz embraced his Master Thesis project as an opportunity to develop a methodology to support holistic lighting design strategies for cities. His work “Street Lighting = HUMANS + SPACE + LIGHT” connects these three components and presents the possibility of reaching sophisticated situations in which each of one the components is expressed in high accordance with the others. A complex yet simple to understand system, that emerges as useful tool to enrich the experience of streets through lighting. His lecture includes a historical overview of the development of street lighting, both in terms of technology and ways of thinking; the presentation of the method in itself and its illustration through a case study in Sweden.
Nora Imaz’s work is also committed with the enhancement of the urban experience by night.
Her presentation shares the development of a project for her hometown - San Sebastian, in the Spanish Basque Country - that started as her Master Thesis, evolved into a proposal for the municipality and became a realized project part of San Sebastian 2016 European Capital of Culture cultural program and integrated also the official agenda of the UNESCO International Year of Light 2015.
Winter Solstice Call was a set of temporary and ephemeral outdoor lighting installations, where people were a vital resource. During the darkest period of the year, the usual street lighting of Concha’s Promenade and its surroundings were transformed by subtle interventions encouraging inhabitants and visitors to reflect on contemporary city night-scapes and the role artificial lighting plays in them.
Diana Joels met both Hanan and Nora when she was a full time lecturer at the Lighting Laboratory of KTH, in Sweden. As responsible for outdoor and urban lighting module of the education and due to her own research project in the field of urban lighting, she naturally got engaged as tutor to both students' theses projects. Her role in this collective presentation is to introduce the problematic, the restless attitude, the humanistic approach and the design thinking behind the different responses to a shared question.