Social Light Movement

The Social Light Movement Manifesto

‘Light is a right, not a privilege’
‘People before places’

The Social Light Movement (SLM) is a philanthropic movement and has been founded in order to create a network for lighting designers and other interested parties to collaborate on the issue of improving lighting for people: particularly those who are unlikely to have access to good quality illumination within their environment.

The SLM exists:

• to demonstrate and to design well lit environments for social and underprivileged housing areas and people
• to involve the community in the actual design of their own environment
• to encourage other designers to work in similar environments and use similar methodologies
• to educate housing associations, housing management teams and social housing ownership bodies about the benefits of good lighting
• to gain the support of city administrations, urban planners, architects, landscape designers, electrical engineers, lighting designers and other associated disciplines
• to create attention, arouse public opinion, influence politicians and decision makers
• to promote responsible energy use within lighting design
• to persuade people that they have the right to expect good lighting
• to never use sodium

Vive La “Light Revolution”!

Sclessin Workshop

The first ever Social Light Movement workshop brought love and light to the people of Sclessin in Liege. Our students came from all over the world – Russia, Mexico, Indonesia, China and the US, spending a week under the inspiring tutelage of Elettra Bordonaro, Isabelle Corten, Erik Olsson and Joran Linder, selecting local sites such as the station, the local square and a housing estate for which they created a range of lighting concepts.

After days of discussion, meeting the inhabitants and testing on site, the groups presented a series of creative ideas to the Liege municipality and the LUCI City Under Microscope conference delegates. Simultaneously, Light Collective was pounding the streets to plan a social guerrilla event to end the week with. Picking sites of local importance, including the viaduct and the local education centre that had formed our base for the week, we invited the community to help us light them as part of the culmination of the workshop. Sclessin is a forgotten area outside the city with high unemployment, little green space, factories, rundown housing and patchy blobs of low pressure sodium. Demonstrating how light can literally and figuratively change a place was our intention and part of the long-term goal of the Social Light Movement.

Hjulsta Workshop

This workshop was supported by The City of Stockholm with Philips and Einar Mattheson, the forward thinking owners of the estate. At the end of the week there was a conference organised by Stockholm Lighting Days. Unlike all the other suburbs (Tensta, Rinkeby, Kista, Husby, Akalla) who were candidates for a SLM workshop in Stockholm, Hjulsta was the only one where there were no amenities for the residents. Hjulsta is located at the end of the metro blue line and is an anonymous suburb with nothing special to distinguish it. The main objective of the workshop was to get out of the office into the spaces that we are design lighting for and to speak to the people that we seek to provide light for. The result of the workshop: Interested residents and outstanding student ideas. Phenomenally creative, practical and above all non-expensive to implement and a housing association that was open to helping us, willing to listen and keen to make the ideas a reality.

Student Presentation: Hjulsta Identity