Dark Design: A New Framework for Advocacy and Creativity for the Nocturnal Commons

Dunn, Nick

doi:10.18848/2325-1328/cgp/v14i04/19-30

Cited by 5 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…IOP Publishing doi:10.1088/1755-1315/1320/1/012001 2 One idea that has been gaining momentum is the re-conceptualisation of darkness as a positive and desirable feature of nightscapes -coalescing around the theories of dark design and designing for darkness [9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. This represents a profound shift in thinking, for while architecture and lighting design have a long history of designing with darkness and shadow, darkness is here imbued with positive moral and aesthetic significance.…”

Section: Light Pollution and The Future Of Cities After Darkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theoretical Foundations of Designing for Darkness

Stone

2024

IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper sketches the theoretical foundations of designing for darkness. Drawing from (lighting) design theory, philosophy of technology, and environmental ethics, it argues that we have an opportunity to re-examine the meaning and experiences of darkness, exploring why and how we should protect or re-introduce darkness into urban nightscapes – not as a constraint, but a constructive goal for urban lighting. It is further positioned as a formative, not prescriptive, framework: bounding and guiding a flexible design process, and able to inform different strategies and approaches. Framed in this way, three core principles are outlined that serve as moral and aesthetic goals for urban lighting. The first is aspirational, situating ‘darkening cities’ as a type of urban (ecological) restoration akin to greening cities. This requires seeing urban darkness as a critical natural infrastructure that can bring both material and social benefits. The second is evaluative, specifying the value-level design requirements to be fostered in urban nightscapes. Lighting strategies should, as a prima facie obligation, promote and preserve the values of darkness. The third principle is experiential, exploring how strategies can create the conditions for positive experiences of – and engagement with – urban darkness. In combination, they offer a means to specify darkness as a design requirement, as well as a reflexive tool to assess and refine the overarching theory of designing for darkness.

show abstract

Section: Light Pollution and The Future Of Cities After Darkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theoretical Foundations of Designing for Darkness

Stone

2024

IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…ALAN is a widely experienced and intuitively understood proxy for human activity at both individual and societal levels. It affects the visual quality of the night and our capacity to experience it as ‘a time and place in its own right’ (Dunn and Edensor, 2020; Edensor, 2013; Melbin, 1978). It has deleterious effects on the health, well-being, and ecologies of humans and non-humans (Chepesiuk, 2009; Fonken and Nelson, 2014; Rich and Longcore, 2013).…”

Section: Multiple Temporalitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, as a tool for facilitating discourse regarding the presence and extent of disruptive Anthropogenic processes, in particular ALAN, artefacts such as the Light Clock may be an excellent means of engaging with public perceptions of the night, ALAN, and exploring the values attached to darkness (Stone, 2017) for example, through participatory methods, such as the design probes discussed by Pschetz et al (2022). Devices such as the Light Clock collect and represent data about the night sky in ways that may also be able to contribute to urban design and corresponding policy that considers the temporality of both day and nightfor example, 'dark design' (Dunn, 2020) and 'nocturnal urbanism' (Narboni, 2017)and human and non-human needs for light and darkness. This could support interventions and imaginaries that recognise the importance of cycles of light and darkness for the health and well-being of human and non-human societies and ecologies.…”

Section: Multiple Temporalitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Time and the Anthropocene: Making more-than-human temporalities legible through environmental observations and creative methods

Griffiths

2023

Time & Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Anthropocene term invokes the multiple temporalities through which organisms, ecologies, and environments unfold – from the immediacy of the present moment to the sedimentary timescales of the geological record. Viewed from the perspective of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation, these organisms, ecologies, and environments, including the planet's human occupants, may well benefit if we took a view of time that was more-than-human in scope and scale. This paper demonstrates how design, creative practice, and technology can be used to make legible human and more-than-human timescales through local, planetary, and celestial imaginaries that are congruent with the Anthropocene term. It first considers various anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic phenomena that are used for time keeping, both human and non-human. It then discusses the design and development of a timepiece that uses observations of environmental light to imaginatively situate daily life within various temporal scales, from embodied, diurnal, circalunar, and annual to the sedimentary timescales of the geological record. Through the timepiece, the paper argues that a hybrid form of timekeeping that brings together human time standards and environmental observation could help align the temporal imaginaries of urban societies with biological, ecological, and planetary processes, while highlighting the presence of potentially damaging anthropogenic processes, such as artificial light at night. Such hybrid forms of timekeeping may help foster meaningful relationships between people and the environment, facilitate day-to-day awareness of the presence and extent of disruptive anthropogenic processes in our environments and provide an imaginative framework for thinking about urban time and life in an Anthropocene context.

show abstract

Section: ‘Perfectly Acceptable’ Concluding Remarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In conjunction with the forensic approach, work that engages with lighting and night-time design is helpful in foregrounding light design’s ‘radical potential for challenging and destabilising the appearance of normality’ (Ebbensgaard, 2020: 1972) through various forms of experiments in producing ‘alternative visions for urban places at night’ (Dunn, 2020: 24). By promoting the ethos of ‘Dark Design’, Nick Dunn encourages light designers and urbanists to take on a more adversarial role in local planning, by visualising how cities could be ‘designed differently to promote positive, non-consumer-orientated experiences and encounters’ (Dunn, 2020: 25). Beyond simply ‘raising public awareness’ about the detrimental effects of over illumination – or, as this paper’s focus, about light violence in the vertical city –‘dark design’ is a subversive practice that finds inspiration in resistive acts that overturn the limitations of lighting standards and regulations (Ebbensgaard, 2020) and by ‘[s]taging social negotiation over meanings of space can challenge contemporary understandings of particular materialities, potentially appropriating space’ (Ebbensgaard, 2015: 120).…”

Section: ‘Perfectly Acceptable’ Concluding Remarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Light violence at the threshold of acceptability

Ebbensgaard

2022

Urban Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper shows how residential high-rise developments in London deteriorate the living conditions for existing residents and set a legal precedent for distributing harm unevenly across the population. The paper unpacks the contentious decision-making process in one of several local planning applications in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets that ended in a spur of high-profile public planning inquiries between 2017 and 2019. The Enterprise House inquiry shows how, among other things, a loss of daylight, sunlight and outlook, and an increased sense of enclosure, affect already marginalised residents in neighbouring buildings disproportionately, elevating light to a legal category for assessing harm and addressing social injustice in the vertical city. The paper adopts a forensic approach to interrogate four instances during the public inquiry, in which numerical evidence of material harm resulting from a loss in daylight, sunlight and outlook was made to appear and disappear. The translation of scientific evidence into legal evidence is performed through the act of claiming ‘truthful’ representations of ‘real life experiences’ of light in digital visualisations. By revealing how material harm resulting from vertical development is normalised and thus naturalised in the planning inquiry, the paper demonstrates how ‘light’ violence is exercised in vertical development.

show abstract

Dark Design: A New Framework for Advocacy and Creativity for the Nocturnal Commons

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Theoretical Foundations of Designing for Darkness

Theoretical Foundations of Designing for Darkness

Time and the Anthropocene: Making more-than-human temporalities legible through environmental observations and creative methods

Light violence at the threshold of acceptability

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About