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Fig. 4.6 Entrance with additional lighting
Fig. 4.7 Entrance without additional lighting
D e s i g n a n d Te s t i n g • Creating with light
Highlighting the entrance On the analysis we had conducted, that the hidden position and darkness of the entrance were one of the main problems that had to do with the discoverability of The Railway City. In other words, the wayfinding in the area was dysfunctional. On the interviews and general discussions, we had found out, that people either don’t notice the tunnel or they don’t know where it leads to. As we wanted to have people notice the entrance better and feel safer around the entrance, we experimented with shining light on the area with different shapes and colours. We ended up mostly discussing the illumination of the vertical surfaces, because we wanted to focus on surfaces that would be visible from distance. Horizontal surfaces are most noticeable from close by. Shining a coloured light on the fence above the entrance made the entrance area (fig. 4.6) more noticeable and interesting when observing from distance. However, we were worried if the fence was an attractive design element, especially on seasons when there are no leaves. We also noticed that the indirect light that was bounced off the entrance wall seemed to provide sufficient illumination for the stairs and bicycle ramp too. Especially compared to the original setting where the level of illumination on the bicycle ramp is a round zero lux.
Fig. 4.9 Fake skylight created by pointing an RGB battery light up to a white surface to create a diffuse indirect light downwards.
Fig. 4.8 On the left, a setting created by the project team. The blue colour is the interpretation of the camera about the poor RGB white, not part of the design suggestion. On the right the original setting.
Pools of light One of the design ideas that had kept with us since the start was to transform the sealed “skylight openings” into fake skylights. The problem with this idea was, that the openings are rather distant from each other. When we simulated the idea of these fake skylights with the battery lights, we created pools of light with the length of 5 meters in the ground, and dark areas with the length of 7 meters in between them. The fixture that would be used on the final design would be different, but the dimensions should stay approximately the same. However interesting we found this rhythm of light and dark to be, the patches of darkness were too big and too dark. The luminosity of the dark areas was almost non-existent, and the tunnel didn’t feel very safe. This problem would have to be tackled in the design by presenting another light source for the dark areas. Doing the physical experiment reinforced the design concept by shoving us, that these fake skylights do add feelings of spaciousness and visual interest. The lights helped in creating an illusion that the space would continue more upwards, compared to the original setting that doesn’t highlight these openings. Although the colour rendering of the RGB white was very poor, we could still see that there was a lot of potential with better fixtures to have the openings feel like actual daylight openings. The fig. 4.10, render done in 3D modeling software Blender, shows in a bigger scale and non-misleading colour, what is the effect we want to achieve. After having conducted experiments on the “pools of light” concept in the form of digital renderings and physical mock-up lighting experiments and the project team felt confident about the idea, a 1:25 scale model (fig. 4.11) was created for further validation and upcoming experiments with interactive lighting design.
Fig. 4.10: Render created in 3D modeling software Blender
Fig. 4.11: 1:25 scale model extended in Photoshop
