Background

As a communication designer, I find working at the intersection between rhetoric, visual, written and digital design as a way to dissect and understand the dynamics that characterize various socio-cultural topics today. My past knowledge and multidisciplinary experience, gathered during my bachelor, in anthropological and journalistic studies, cultural understanding, design theory and semiotics made me fascinated by identifying and assessing various phenomena in relation to social contexts. It taught me how to use research and design as means of speculating how things could be, informed by people’s reflections on their own everyday life. For me, this form of design practice thrives on imagination of design speculations, which act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality.

During my master studies in lighting design, I have found a great interest in studying daylight, particularly exploring its effects onto people and domestic spaces. In virtue of my foundational knowledge and experience in research and communication theories, I find it relevant today to utilize said abilities to fulfill the vision of understanding and informing on the qualities and benefits of daylight at large. As I have been sitting in my home office these past couple of years, I caught myself many times in this cycle of short breaks looking out the window, which only accentuated my wondering on how many possible realities are there for why and how people perceive windows and views the way they do. My argument is that looking outside is more than just sporadically perceived sensation of a natural phenomenon, but rather it is a sense in people and, similarly to the other senses, it is a bio-cultural one.

During the previous semester’s internship I had with the specialist lighting team at Arup Dublin, most of the projects I have been involved in were centered around daylighting practices; the resulting report I had written was titled “Daylighting in the design process of the built environment – a study bridging innovative research and practice for analyzing and communicating the qualities of daylight”. As I was getting introduced to the Arup work culture and history, the company’s founder (Ove Arup) and his attitude towards good work practices played a great role in the early formulation of my internship report. Familiar figure within the Danish culture, he was the brain behind the philosophy of total design, which really resonates with me, as a multidisciplinary

lighting designer. That is because he believed that great architecture is accomplished when technique, design and aesthetics of building design are combined – much like what our lighting design master programme, which I have been emphasizing throughout my internship report. To examine the complex configurations of daylight through which it has been conceptualized and practiced across time and space, I draw on emotive, technical, technological and sustainable methods, theories and approaches, many of which inspired by the practice of Arup’s remarkable lighting team in Dublin. To put it briefly, the report can be reduced to the following framework for lighting designers: 1) preserve and employ the natural variation of daylight, 2) assess daylight performance beyond established standards and in a sustainable way, 3) use technological advances to improve your workflow and 4) give users the possibility to inform the improvement of design. These said key points provided a starting ground for me to build up on for the master thesis writing.

As I continue to learn, in today’s built environment, daylight’s impact is long-term and it has to be put into a good foundation, where people understand it and are more sensitive to using it in their domestic spaces. As daylighting crosses many professional boundaries and academic disciplines and it requires a comprehensive groundwork, I want to continue the discussion around daylighting started with my internship report during for my final thesis as well, but with a more palpable and useful application that can inspire not only lighting designers, but also dwellers of today’s residential spaces.

Committed to taking a leading role within building industry to create better environments for working, living and learning, and with a long history of researching practices, Velux3 has been one company to highlight a problem area being that a lot of the current research practices and activities nowadays are often targeted towards architects or professionals in the field – of lighting, energy or environment – but Velux sees the possibility of reaching the end-user more directly. This has become one of the aims of this study, which shaped the way daylight and views to the sky have been investigated and analyzed further on.