Designing with dynamic light textures

Abstract

This thesis provides the reader with the necessary theoretical frameworks to understand the research aimed towards answering the question: which associations do people have with atmospheres influenced by dynamic light textures? This question is then used to provide a framework of guidelines for the designer. A review of lighting design history introduced the terms ambient luminescence, focal glow and play of brilliants proposed by Kelly (Kelly, 1952). Research into perceptual psychology then disentangled principles of perception to the reader, after which it was found that mood was commonly used to measure the impact of environments. Contradictory results of studies suggested that mood lacked a reliable method of measurement. In a study by Vogels (Vogels, 2008), introducing the term atmosphere as a stable alternative for mood, defined as the affective evaluation of the environment, was introduced. In this study, the impact of static light conditions on atmosphere perception was investigated. It was found that four underlying variables are of influence when perceiving environments with static light conditions: cosiness, liveliness, tenseness and detachedness. Focusing on dynamic light conditions, a distinction was made between using real-world or abstract dynamic patterns as stimuli. The way people perceive real-world scenes was found to vary depending on culture and background (Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005) (Kuwabara & Smith, 2016), leading to the preference for abstract patterns. A translation of abstract patterns into dynamic light textures was made by considering the principle of ensemble perception. Inspired by the natural world 39 stimuli were created. Participants were subjected to these stimuli in an experiment, finding that participants use the same words when describing atmospheres influenced by dynamic light textures through a frequency analysis. Participants’ responses were clustered according to their meaning, resulting in a 40 word lexicon. A set of 13 stimuli were shown to 16 participants in a second experiment, and participants’ responses were recorded using a questionnaire containing the 40 word lexicon. 
It was found that participants gave relatively the same responses. Additionally, it was found through a principal component analysis that three underlying variables are present in the perception of atmospheres influenced by dynamic light conditions: tenseness, liveliness and detachment. Furthermore, it was confirmed that people are able to distinguish between the perceived atmospheres. Cosiness was not found to be a principal component in our construct. Regarding the workings of the underlying variables found, we found that liveliness is influenced by organisation of shapes in the texture and colour contrasts. Tenseness is influenced by the complexity of individual forms within textures; it is also influenced by colour contrasts. Brilliance contrasts in the texture influence liveliness of a space; sharpness contrasts influence the sense of detachment. Dynamics in the textures, like the rate of change, influence both the liveliness and tenseness axes and might influence the detachment axis. The findings of the experiments and analyses were used to develop a framework usable by designers, noting however that several points of recommendation were made to improve the reliability and usability of this framework.