Launched in late 2012, Configuring Light/Staging the Social aims to build a network of linked projects to forge dialogue between social sciences, design, architecture and urban planning focused on the social role of light and lighting. In this guest post, Mona Sloane from the Configuring Light/Staging the Social team reports on their recent tour of Australia. Featured image credit: “Sydney Opera House” by Franzed (licensed under CC), via Flickr

Configuring Light/Staging the Social on talking about light ‘Down Under’

From 16 – 27 March 2015, Don Slater and Mona Sloane toured the Configuring Light programme across Australia, giving a range of talks on the programme’s current research as well as Configuring Light’s LSE HEIF5 Urban Lightscapes project.

The first week kicked off with a soiree organised by the Institute for Sustainable Futures at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) where our presentation on lighting the urban public realm sparked great discussions around lighting, visual rhythms and sociability among the interdisciplinary group of UTS scholars who came along. The Sydney week continued with a Sydney Ideas Seminar hosted by the Cities Network at the Sydney Environment Institute of the University of Sydney where we spoke about the role of social research in lighting design. During our Sydney stay, we also met up with the City of Sydney design team to talk about the Whitecross project, lighting standards and questions around improving outdoor spaces through lighting interventions that are grounded in social research. We also had inspiring conversations with the team of ASPECT studios on daylight, local specificities and social mapping and enjoyed meeting the VIVID Ideas team and hear about their experiences in organising a large-scale lighting event. The Sydney adventure ended with a highlight of the Australia tour: the Illumni Urban Lightscapes/Social Nightscapes event Sydney at the Australian Institute of Architects, sponsored by iGuzzini. We presented the Whitecross project to a wide practitioner audience consisting of landscape designers, architects, city designers, interior designers, academics and lighting designers. On the panel were Nicole Dennis (Senior Urban Designer at Roberts Day), Tim Carr (Australasian Lighting Leader at Arup) and Mirjam Roos (Associate at Steensen Varming). The positive response to our integrated and collaborative approach to social research and lighting design was overwhelming and we enjoyed a lively Q&A session led by TV personality and Creative Director of LLIGHT Joe Snell.

For the second week of the trip, we headed to Melbourne where we kicked off another series of events with the Illumni Urban Lightscapes/Social Nightscapes event Melbourne. The distinguished panel consisted of Professor Rob Adams (Director – City Design, City of Melbourne), Neil Stonell (Partner at Grimshaw Architects), Steve Brown (Design Director of NDYLIGHT), and Jonathan Daly (Behavioural Scientist + Urbanist at studiohuss). Joe Snell once more proved to be a great moderator and headed a very articulate debate on the role lighting can play for improving urban spaces. Again, the dominance of lighting standards and questions around liability and health and safety were a major topic, alongside comments on governance and multidisciplinary urban design teams. The main event of the week was the two-day RMIT Symposium ‘Atmosphere and Infrastructure: Global Calibrations of Culture, Design and Urban Space’, organised by Sarah Pink, where both Don Slater and Mona Sloane gave papers on their current research. Following an invitation by Heather Horst (RMIT Principal Research Fellow), the academic engagement continued with a PhD masterclass Don Slater gave for students of the Mobilising Media for Sustainable Outcomes in the Pacific Region project. Concluding the Mebourne week, we gave our last Configuring Light presentation in a seminar hosted by the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and the Design Futures Lab.

Our final adventure of our tour ‘Down Under’ was a one-day trip to Adelaide, where we met up with the design team of Renewal SA to talk about lighting, social research and regeneration projects. We were shown around the centre of Adelaide and its beautiful Riverside Precinct before we sat down with the team to have an inspiring discussion on how to explicitly bring together social research and lighting in a major inner-city redevelopment.

The Australia tour was a truly inspiring endeavour and Configuring Light would like to thank everybody who has been part of it. We look forward to continuing the dialogue and bringing some of our work to Australia. If you have comments or questions, please do get in touch: configuringlight@lse.ac.uk

For further information about the Configuring Light/Staging the Social project, visit their website