A City of Choices

Following my initial observation of light pollution, Taylor Stone’s paper The Value of Darkness: A Moral Framework for Urban Nighttime Lighting provided a new way to read the issue. Instead of focusing only on the negative effects of excessive artificial light, the paper asks what positive environmental, social, and cultural values are contained in darkness itself.

Building on the question of how much darkness a city should preserve, I translated real urban lighting conditions into a modular spatial system. By abstracting residential, public, commercial, and entertainment lighting into different forms and materials, I explored how each type of light occupies and reshapes space.

Press to decide. Participants press individual modules to switch different urban light sources on or off, turning a physical gesture into a lighting decision.

Accumulation creates consequences. As more modules are activated, overall brightness increases and triggers environmental feedback, modeling how individual choices accumulate into city-scale light pollution.

Small frosted light modules diffuse light evenly. Large transparent modules create varied heights and light diffusion. A modular base with Wago connectors integrates channels for power and control. The acrylic light cube is 30 × 30 mm.

• Darkness as a value Night is not empty space. It holds ecological, social, and cultural meaning.
• Light as accumulation City glow is not one lamp. It is many small decisions stacked together.
• A gesture becomes a policy Pressing a module turns personal choice into a visible lighting decision.
• Prototype as argument LEGO, PETG, and a 3V LED make the right-to-darkness question tactile.