Light, Dark and Lighting Design for Shared Public Spaces: New perspectives on experiences of the lit world

This chapter introduces the book and its central argument for an interdisciplinary approach to lighting design that focuses on how people experience illumination: how it feels, what it makes possible or imaginable and what it shuts down or limits. The book advances a research approach that contextualises lighting technology in the dynamic and emergent everyday worlds of people. It approaches illumination in relation to other things, feelings, ideas and processes that already exist and that form part of how people understand themselves and the world around them. In doing so, it explains how the chapters in the book demonstrate how feelings of comfort, safety, security, vulnerability, care and well-being can configure in and through how people experience and manipulate light, and that improved experiences of the built environment can result from more sensitive and context-specific lighting design.