The Brief
The main challenge was to create an integrated lighting plan for the residential area around Buikslotermeerplein which contributes to an interactive, safe and pleasant atmosphere in the outdoor space whilst gathering energy in a sustainable way. It also had to fit the theme of 'glowing nature'.
My role
Interaction designer, creative lead, user tester
Client
The Light Challange, Municipality of Amsterdam
Understanding the user & research
After visiting and interviewing Buikslotermeerplein locals, we found out that nobody likes to go outside at night due to the dark surroundings, which feel cold and unsafe. We started by researching projects that use sustainable sources of energy, going through the case studies and understanding the current context of sustainable light design. Initially, we considered generating electricity from soil and plants. After several experiments, we found that the electronic current produced is not powerful enough to light up the LED's. It encouraged us to explore other options for energy.
Our idea
Our idea was inspired by the Japanese Peace Lily, which is also what we named our project after as Yuri is the Japanese translation of Lily. It uses a combination of solar power and wind power to power the LED’s in all seasons. The idea was that the interactivity and friendliness of the light would appeal to the family neighbourhood, drawing more people outside to enjoy the communal spaces. This as well as the extra lighting would in turn make the neighbourhood feel safer.
User testing
Then, we started to ideate more on interactivity and make our product engage with the help of lighting elements and actuators such as distance sensors. Afterwards, we made rounds of iterations by building different prototypes. We successfully tested one of our prototypes in the LUNA Festival at Leeuwarden which helped us collect valuable feedback from a wide variety of groups of people. For example, some visitors didn’t interact with the design as we directed, instead they approached it from different directions, causing the distances sensors to get confused. It made us think more about the real use case in the neighbourhood, so we decided to add sensors all around the pole in the next prototype. We made improvements in time for our final prototype that would be presented at the Floriade Expo 2022.
Interactive states of our light
The design is interactive and has four states of interactivity. The first state is when no one is around the light will be on dim mode, to save energy and not to disrupt wildlife as much as possible. The second state is triggered as someone walks past, the light gets brighter and reacts with single-colour animation. Then when two people are coming from two directions, they will trigger a three-colour animation. Lastly, when three or more people approach the light, they will see a rainbow of light dancing in front of their eyes.
Floriade Festival
Preparing for the Floriade took a lot of late nights and hard work, along the way we all learnt lots of different kinds of new knowledge that broadened our skillset for both digital and physical interaction design.
Winning 2nd prize
Our solution ended up winning second place at The Floriade Festival 2022 and will be displayed there for 6 months. In the next steps for this project, we will collaborate with the municipality to develop a fully functional prototype, which means collaborating with engineers to finalise the design. We hope our design will bring fun and brightness to the neighbourhood of Buikslotermeerplein, whilst at the same time using sustainable energy to do so.
