Bright ideas

Clamped to lampposts, strange objects with metallic fins glow red, green, silver, black, red and white... Inside each one, an unseen eye registers the passing of every car, reads its colour and sends another pulse of light through the finned body. These sci-fi intruders look like something out of Blade Runner. In fact, they are interactive light installations that line a route used for festival processions between Leicester’s new cultural quarter and the Peepul Centre, a community facility a mile-and-a-half outside the centre.

When Leicester city council commissioned designer Jason Bruges to create something for the route, it wanted an installation that would mark the way during festivals like Diwali, Chinese New Year and Eid. But this meant that any scheme would be used only four, perhaps five, times a year. Bruges thought that was a wasted opportunity, and he managed to persuade the council that he was right.

“We wanted to create something that really interacted with the local environment,” he says. “It can be used for festivals, and even colour programmed specially, but after we’d initially considered the project, we realised that it could do so much more. Local people love it.” Now, Leicester has a route permanently enlivened by Bruges’ alien light invaders, and the council is considering installing them on other roads, too.

The installation comprises brushed stainless steel banners set onto streetlights, each one containing a small colour-sensing camera in its base. Using a power supply and driver within the main column, colour information from passing cars is collected and instantly fed to RGB LED arrays hidden behind a polycarbonate diffuser. As each car drives by, a correspondingly coloured pulse travels up the banner: the more different hues of car, the more colours appear in the lights.

Bruges’ projects draw on architecture, lighting design and sculptural art, and he is reluctant to categorise the work within one field. But his ideas most often take the form of interactive designs that use lighting. The reason for this is that he wants to engage with people and involve them in their surroundings.

“So few people, especially young folks, are actually interested in their immediate environment,” he says. “They are consumed with their own lives and don’t seem to care what is going on around them. If we can make them stop and look, make them appreciate their environment, we are creating a catalyst for them to care more about it. And light is one of the best ways of doing it.”

The ways in which Bruges gets people’s attention are many and varied, and the settings just as diverse. A project soon to be realised involves a major interactive installation attached to London Bridge. “We’ve utilised the technology that is now embedded in mobile phones, PDAs, laptops and even watches to create this installation,” he explains. “Each device has a radio frequency identification tag put in it during manufacture.

“Our light scheme will be unknowingly activated by anyone passing by with a phone, laptop or something similar that contains one of these devices. Special Bluetooth readers will pick up their presence and cause the installation to change. Imagine a bus going over the bridge with 50 people with mobile phones on it. The installation will go mad and you’ll be able to visualise an instant in the journey that mobiles are making.”

Not too far away in London’s Spitalfields is another of Bruges’ projects, which is still in the process of being completed. This vast chandelier, which spans 10 storeys, hangs from the ceiling of a Foster-designed office building. it consists of a matrix of 624 globes, each of which is 120 mm in diameter.

Cameras on the roof of the building film the clouds and sky passing overhead. These pictures are converted using bespoke software and the information is fed through vertical power and data looms running down to flexible printed circuit boards within each sphere. They illuminate in sequence in horizontal grids, bringing the sky down, in layers, to everyone inside the building.

Bruges enjoys this interaction with people more than any other aspect of his work. And he believes it is the immediacy of the medium of light that makes it possible – it’s a capacity that he first realised while studying architecture at the Bartlett, University College London.

We wanted to link into the community, and not create a detached culture palace

“Architecture made me frustrated. It has the capacity to change the way we see our surroundings – but it does it slowly. You work on a project for 10 years and the realisation of it is slow to trickle down to the street. With light you can instantly change the way a person perceives something. And, if you can allow them to be involved in changing their surroundings or get them to think differently about them, then it is all the more democratic a medium.”

A recent project, entitled Litmus, involved four large numeric displays installed alongside roads in the London borough of Havering.

They easily go unnoticed by day, but stand out vividly in the darkness and many motorists driving by were intrigued.

“No explanation was given for the changing numbers, initially, and that got people talking,” Bruges says. “There was even a debate on Radio 4 about them and so, when we revealed that they were readings of local pollution and light levels, interest in the installation soared and the results of the readings became very relevant to everyone in the area.”

But here Bruges surely touches on a fundamental objection to which his work is vulnerable – how do you justify consuming power for aesthetic, arguably frivolous, purposes? “Almost every illumination type is a waste of energy, if you look at it from that perspective,” he concedes.

“But designers, whatever their specialty, should take a responsible approach when it comes to environmental issues. We constantly strive to use low energy technologies and materials. We are mindful that our projects stand up to scrutiny, and we are now designing using renewables and micro energy-harvesting devices.”

Two of the newest commissions by the Studio – Bruges’ design company – exemplify this approach. In Aberafan, south Wales, glowing wind turbines will act as large beach location markers. The turbines will power the light installation, with extra energy sold back to the National Grid.

In south London, an energy use indicator installation near a substation utilises untapped power from the substation that would be too costly to extract for conventional use. It displays peaks in energy use to the local people as coloured light. “It makes them aware of the energy they consume and when they are using most of it,” says Bruges.

His architectural training places Bruges in one camp, and his use of light in another. But he doesn’t see himself as limited to either. “Here at the studio, we encompass a wide range of skills – architects, lighting designers, industrial designers, programmers, interactive specialists – we sit between so many different disciplines.

“I trained as an architect, we compete with artists, I’ve been called a lighting designer but I see us as working in interactive design. I’m not affiliated to any organisation because I don’t really fit into one in particular. In fact, I’ve been talking to like-minded people within the interactive design field about setting up our own body, but that is still at very early stages.”

Much like his interesting designs, Bruges is not easily defined – and he’s happy that way. “We are very aware of, say, what goes into designing a building but we can come at our element of it without the constraints of the architect. Our ideas are less fettered by regulation and so are richer for it. We pride ourselves on not knowing too much about any one discipline and therefore we add something fresh to everything we work on.”