Previous Jams

Jam 2

The second Stockholm Nerd Jam was a fun event! The topic under discussion was “Urban Lighting.” Questioning the typical approach to urban street lighting, Hanan Peretz was in search of a new approach that takes into consideration our perceptual capacities as human beings, the qualities of our urban habitat and light qualities. If you want to get involved with helping Hanan realize his lighting installation, contact the design nerds through our site or on facebook!

Read more on Hanan’s Thesis and the various ideas to improve Urban Lighting.

Master thesis | Hanan Peretz: Street lighting in the urban environment
Today the starting point of planning urban lighting is the light regulation. Mainly the regulation based on cars traffic and focused more on the roads than the sidewalks. They don’t take in consideration the pedestrians that they are the important people that really experience the urban environment unlike car drivers that experience the street in a completely different perspective. My impression is that the urban environment and the street lighting are not working together. It looks likes that they are two different systems instead of enhancing each other they are against another. In this thesis I would like to explore how to enhance the space experience in our city streets, mainly for pedestrians.

For that I’m trying to create guidelines for street lighting that based more on the three main elements of the street lighting:
Space- the urban environment. Human- the users of the space. Light- responsible on the way we perceive and experience the space
In order to create these guidelines, I’m exploring into depth these three ingredients and try to understand how they influence one another in order to create better night time environment in our urban spaces. To develop more carefully this concept, I want to make real small light installations in Rudsjöterrassen Street, Handen, to examine my methodology. Hopefully these guidelines that I will create will be a starting point for creating street lighting and the regulation will be the last point. This in order to create street lighting that is more related to the urban environment and human perspective.

Sense of the city: A new approach that’s take in consideration our perceptual capacities as human beings, the qualities of our urban habitat and Light qualities. Sensorial revelation: “I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.” The city has long been dominated by the eye. Our urban experiences, even our memories, are rooted above all in images.

Even the night, traditionally a time of darkness and silence, has slowly been colonized by the eye. We have been able to cross the frontier of darkness with the help of artificial lighting, which offers us an illusory sense of security. So dependent are we on vision that it is only by prolonging it into the night that we feel secure in our ability to understand and control our surroundings.

Hence the same physical space of the city forms the backdrop for two parallel urban realities which are similar, but different: the daytime city and the nocturnal city. The city that is reveled to us at night is more abstract place in which unexpected streets, parks, buildings, or detailed emerge. While familiar ones suddenly vanish.

From safe to lively streets: City lights – those “highly expressive signposts to the nature of urban culture”? what role will they play in the city of the 21st century? We emerging from an era when urban street lighting – and the city itself – was subsumed by converting values of the automobile and crime prevention.

Inaugural Jam

The Inaugural Stockholm Nerd Jam went off beautifully. We had 12 enthusiastic Nerds come out to jam on Martin LeFrancq’s thesis topic on “Urban Games.” Lots of great ideas were thrown around, debated and elaborated on.