Re-thinking Lighting Design in a Sustainable Future

With the greatest challenge of our time – the climate crisis – we begin to understand the need to rethink our ways of living, to maintain the ecosystems we are part of and depend upon. In that perspective, the role of lighting design has radically changed – we now understand light as an important tool in balancing the needs of both humans and the planet.  

With today’s technological advances, possibilities are almost endless when working with light. Yet, some things never change: since the dawn of humanity, the sun has governed our bodies, rhythms and visual experience of the world; the more we are shielded in indoor environments, the more we seek a connectedness to nature and natural daylight. 

At a time of rapid technological change, we can easily forget the importance of supporting sustainable development from a holistic perspective, considering not only energy consumption, but also sustainable behavior, human well-being, better biodiversity for animals and plants, lifecycle assessments for products, connectedness, etc. However, we must solve the complex interplay between these aspects, if we are to meet the 2050 goal of reducing the CO2 emission to net-zero and, at the same time, ensure a more sustainable approach to how we bring light into our environments. 

Lighting design is a diverse field involving a wide range of disciplines, including lighting design, architecture and interior design, lighting engineering, virtual and media technology, cognitive and neuroscience, product development, amongst others. This diversity of approach, driven by collective desires for better lighting, presents certain challenges, but through knowledge-sharing across different scientific fields, we can propose new ways of living with light: ways that consider the needs of people and the planet, and rethink the approach to lighting design in both research and practice. 

In this context, Light Symposium 2022 (LS2022) is the 8th in a series of successful conferences, which have had the objective to bring together researchers, professionals and industry. The aim is to deliver a state-of-the-art outline of how to define sustainable approaches for lighting design to meet the UN sustainable development goals.

At LS2022, an international committee consisting of representatives from six different universities, the lighting industry, practice, Danish Center for Light (DCL) and the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD) will present a program of presentations from researchers and practice, discussions, workshops, exhibitions and social activities. The overall intention is to exchange knowledge about how we together rethink lighting design into a sustainable future.


The conference topics of interests include but are not limited to:

Daylight benefits and optimization

Daylight and lighting meeting human needs for natural environments 

Hybrid lighting

Dynamic lighting

Responsive facades

Daylight design

Daylight systems

Light, health and behavior

Indoor climate and comfort

Light and well-being

Biological impact of lighting

Integrative lighting

Flicker

Light hazard

Urban lighting and sustainability

Smart cities and lighting

Darkness and atmosphere

Light and biodiversity

Reducing light pollution

Social lighting

Light supporting behavior

Light and safety

Light supporting sustainable mobility

Lighting technologies and circular economy

Personalized lighting systems

Smart lighting systems and luminaires 

Lighting systems interfaces

Lighting and big data/machine learning

Product life cycle

New materials for lighting fixtures

Lighting retrofit

Methodologies in Lighting Research and Education

Surveying and monitoring methods

Cross disciplinary methods

User interaction

Sustainable solutions – tools and standards in the design process

Future design standards for lighting design

Simulation and design tools

Tools for designing sustainable solutions with light

Building performance evaluation

Lighting design and the UN sustainability goals

Transdisciplinary processes for holistic design