Audi Design Talks: The role of light in design

Enlightenment vs. light pollution

The Anthropocene: an era of discovery, conquest, and excess. A time when a rapidly growing human population is not only trying to secure its basic needs, but is also increasing consumption and comfort at the expense of the environment, the climate, and its own future. This escalation has an inevitable impact on the state of Spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller called our planet. One of its tools is the progressive electrification of various dimensions of our lives and the devices that accompany us, from toothbrushes to bicycles.

One effect of this escalation is the excess of artificial light visible in our environment. Light pollution can take many forms. It is the glow covering the night sky over ever-larger areas of the globe. It is external architectural and infrastructural lighting that disrupts the biological clocks of living organisms. It is also the blue light that prevents billions of people addicted to smartphones from falling asleep.

We consider the light we control to be a blessing. It represents the myth of Prometheus, revelation, illumination, and safety in our city streets. But what if the benefit of a phenomenon over which we have gained control is now becoming a curse? Is it losing its significance and appeal, like everything else that has become mass-produced, because of its accessibility, increasing power, and human expansion? Does it make us addicted to its presence and what it stands for—readily available electricity resulting from the extraction of fossil fuels? Or perhaps, regardless of the source of energy, the excess of light is becoming a burden for us: proof of our lost contact with nature and a state of disrupted harmony? 

In that case, can we imagine our everyday life with less light? If so, would light gain a special status and quality? Can we propose new rules for its use? Or perhaps the relationship between the “dark” and unknown and the “light” and defined should be different? Does turning away from the path of flooding the world with ever more intense light necessarily mean a return to the “dark ages” before the Enlightenment?