Caring Lights:
Connected Lighting for a Caring City
MIT Design Lab x Signify/Philips lighting (2018-2019)
I led a research team of 6-10 students/researchers in this 18 months long research project to design a connected lighting experience enabled by ambient intelligence.
How can cities show that it cares for us?
Can we translate these value-driven experiences through connected lighting services across home, work, and urban spaces?
In this year-long project, I provided research framework and led the design team to investigate ‘meaning of light’ and affective qualities of ‘caring’ through secondary and ethnographic research.
We used these values as a guide to envision experience concepts for a connected lighting infrastructure enabled by ambient intelligence and pervasive sensing. These concepts for a ‘Caring City’ was conveyed through visual storytelling.
We also conducted multiple stakeholder workshops to bring their POV and evaluate the feasibility and business impact of proposed concepts.
(check out project webpage below for more info)
Project Phases
Caring Values
What makes you feel cared for? What would you expect from a city that is caring?
Following user interviews with people of different demographics we produced a video to present the values of 'caring’ experience.
Caring AI
Design of an ambient intelligent system delivers the affective qualities/values of ‘caring’.
Four Residents of Caring City
We created four personas to highlight the caring values that would be supported by the connected lighting experience of the Caring City. Three scenarios were developed for each persona. Storytelling videos can be found on Caringlights.org
Gestural Interaction Language
How would you communicate and control with an intelligent lighting system? We designed a gestural language to communicate with ambient AI, intelligent connected lights.
More information about this research can be found in this publication.