Campus Lighting at UC San Diego

In this project, my team and I tackled the problem of insufficient campus lighting by designing a year-long interdisciplinary program called “Light Up the Path” which seeks to implement artwork projections on the streets of campus. This solution seeks to make the campus a brighter – and thus safer – environment for the UC San Diego community. This project drew upon principles from Critical Design Practice which teaches designers accountability towards who they are designing for. 

Notably, my team received the “Let’s Do It!” Award which was given to the design solution that most people wanted to participate in and see implemented. 

Because our main goal was to design a counterscript, we went through the following process that focuses on formulating a design solution and refining it as much as possible. 

To begin defining the problem, we looked at the shortcomings of existing outdoor lights on campus using autoethnography. Through sharing our personal experiences and real-world observations from living on campus, we then gathered the following insights: 

1. The lack of lighting makes students feel unsafe walking alone; and

2. There is an unequal distribution of lighting across colleges which makes it difficult to navigate campus as a whole. For instance, Sixth College is well-lit at night while its neighbors, such as Marshall and Muir College, suffer from a lack of light. 

With this shared understanding of the problems of the script we are tackling (i.e. campus lighting), we then moved on to brainstorming solutions using the following how might we statement: “How might we use outdoor lighting to make students feel safer on campus?”

We first began this process by doing a group brainstorm around the HMW statement and came up with ideas, discussed our top choices, and then integrated different components from each into our initial design:

Using the storyboard on the far right, we began interviews with members of the community to gather their thoughts and experiences related to our initial design solution. As this is our first time interacting with possible stakeholders, we sought to get holistic information regarding the different aspects of our design (i.e. artwork projection, campus lighting, community participation). We thus divided our interview questions into three categories: general thoughts, experience with lighting on campus, and their stance on our design.

From the aforementioned insights, my team and I then began addressing each concern to the best of our ability. Our iteration then came in the form of an annual student-based interdisciplinary program that would seek to implement the projector artwork. This is because we realized how positively students connected with our solution, but we did not have all the answers to their questions as we lacked knowledge of actual projector technicalities. As a result, we had to accept our own shortcomings and that there is more work to be done to make our design solution more tangible. 

After our second iteration, we held a Design Critique session to gain feedback from our peers once more. Here, we introduced our problem, our design process, and design iterations. We also asked for specific feedback on the community aspect of our design as we felt the new program made it less likely for many students to feel like they had a say in the artwork projection. We made space for questions on the program and other concerns as well in order for students to give us their genuine reactions. You can view our slides here. 

Our design solution thus still takes the form of an annual student-based interdisciplinary program that would seek to implement the projector artwork. But we have expanded the specifics of our solution by creating a program description, updating our storyboard, adding more academic departments and refining partners,  and a more detailed timeline that includes the human-centered design process. Check out our final presentation and design solution here.