Urban Echoes

Henrika Pihlajaniemi, Toni Österlund and Aulikki Herneoja: Urban Echoes – Adaptive and Communicative Urban Lighting in the Virtual and the Real

Part of Paper Session 1: Design and Implementation

Learn more about Urban Echoes at MAB14.

Abstract: New lighting technologies with means to control urban lighting pursuant to sensor data in real-time is approaching the market and design schemes. However, there is a lack of design tools for designing adaptive lighting without programming skills. In addition, the communicative potential of outdoor lighting in urban environments is unused. This paper presents a real-world demo of adaptive and communicative urban lighting, called Urban Echoes (UE).

The paper focuses on: 1) the development and testing process of a novel design tool for adaptive urban lighting, and 2) the exploration of the design and realization process of UE, a temporary, adaptive and communicative park lighting system. In UE, park lighting reacted to park visitors’ movements through a multi-agent system based adaptation process. The system was developed to produce a rich variety of dynamic lighting schemes, designed and simulated with the tool. In addition, UE visualised urban information with light patterns by user request on mobile devices.

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Paper Session 1: Design and Implementation
This session takes place in the morning of November 21. It features four talks:

Ben van Berkel, Astrid Piber and Filippo Lodi: Designing with the Immaterial

Dietmar Offenhuber and Susanne Seitinger: Over the Rainbow: Information Design for Low-Resolution Urban Displays

Henrika Pihlajaniemi, Toni Österlund and Aulikki Herneoja: Urban Echoes: Adaptive and Communicative Urban Lighting in the Virtual and the Real

Alexander Wiethoff, Thomas Bauer and Sven Gehring: Investigating Multi-User Interactions on Interactive Media Façades