Experiencing participatory and communicative urban lighting through LightStories

This paper presents the results of a real-world adaptive urban lighting demo conducted in a pedestrian street in the centre of a city in Northern Finland. The main objectives were to explore methods of enabling the inhabitants of the city to participate in the design of public urban lighting, as well as interaction and communication through urban lighting. This article discusses the participants' experiences of participation and their attitudes towards adaptive and interactive lighting. The case project -- LightStories (Valotarina) -- applied a web-based design tool which offered our participants the possibility to devise one-hour long lighting designs, displayed along a pedestrian oriented street. Additionally, users could write a narrative or a message associated with their lighting design, published on the website and the public UBI touch screens. This article describes both our participants' experiences of participation and how LightStories (LS) was used as an ambient media in urban space.