How the city feels: Workshopping lighting design in public space

This chapter provides an account of a research co-design workshop that saw participants investigate the affordances of light in an inner-city laneway by manipulating a range of luminaires and reflecting on how their decisions shaped the ‘feel’ of the space. This approach was developed following a series of collaborative investigations of lighting design that helped advance an approach that attends to the atmospheric and experiential ‘lit world’. The approach recognises that how we feel in the urban built environment is configured by a continually emerging range of factors that lighting design contributes to but cannot comprehensively determine. In showing how design ethnographic approaches can be applied to the investigation of lighting in urban public spaces, the chapter argues that we need practice- and experience-based accounts of the relationship between lighting design and public safety. An implication is that lighting design needs to be driven not only by practical concerns and regulatory stipulations but by concepts that go beyond visual apprehension and that connect to ideas of care, safety and belonging.