VOLUME 14 ISSUE 4

The International Journal of

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Design in Society

__________________________________________________________________________

Dark Design
A New Framework for Advocacy and
Creativity for the Nocturnal Commons

NICK DUNN

DESIGNPRINCIPLESANDPRACTICES.COM
 EDITOR
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 Dark Design: A New Framework for Advocacy
and Creativity for the Nocturnal Commons
Nick Dunn, 1 Lancaster University, UK

Abstract: Urbanization continues to provide habitat for more and more of the planet’s human population.
Accompanying this process are the energy, transport, and service infrastructures that support urban life. Enmeshed in
these networks is artificial illumination and its unintended consequences. Light pollution, for instance, accounts for a
growing global carbon footprint, yet more efficient artificial lighting methods using LEDs have resulted in increasingly
higher levels of brightness at night. This is altering natural cycles of light and dark, directly impacting on the circadian
rhythms of our bodies and having disastrous effects upon other species and their ecosystems. This issue of critical
importance has been referred to by some scientists as a hidden global challenge but the public awareness and
understanding of it is negligible. Where is design in addressing such poor performance? The growing problem of how
we perceive darkness and the attempts to manage it, typically through artificial illumination, requires new design
strategies to create viable alternatives to current pathways. How can we advocate for the “nocturnal commons” when
the majority of society does not even know what is disappearing or understand the implications? This article proposes
the concept of “Dark Design” to set out a new framework for advocacy and creativity to raise awareness of these
complex issues and address them. By bringing together a diverse range of approaches, “Dark Design” seeks to
establish a field for emerging principles and practices to design with darkness rather than against it. In doing so, it
calls for the important and urgent need for design to commit, act and engage others in the future of our planet, its
people, and non-human species.

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Keywords: “Dark Design”, Advocacy, Creativity, Darkness, Design, Ecology, Nocturnal Commons, Urbanization

Urbanization and the Loss of Night

S ince the publication of the UNFPA’s 2007 report (UNFPA 2007), we have been
frequently reminded that the majority of the global population will be urban. A more
recent report by the UN DESA Population Division (2018) projects that by 2050 there
will be 68 per cent of us living in urban areas. This transition, alongside the rate of urbanization
processes occurring in manifold ways and across different contexts, is having profound effects
upon our environment, our health, and our societies. Urban landscapes, especially cities, are
complex and dynamic intermeshes of multiple physical and non-physical infrastructures and
systems. The opportunities that urban areas provide for many of us to flourish and potentially
transform our lives in positive ways are only one side of the situation. Conversely, it is through
the same fluctuating forces and interrelationships that many issues arise in urban contexts. The
increasing population density and demands of urban environments has also led to problems
including: inequality, resources, and various forms of pollution. It is the latter category that
forms the focus of our attention here. Urban pollution manifests in distinct ways and across
different mediums, notably through air, noise and waste. These represent major challenges for
urban life and can have serious impacts on our health and the wider environment. However,
until recently, the issues caused by light pollution have received comparatively little attention
and are only beginning to enter the public imagination as a serious problem (Drake 2019). The
advent of artificial illumination and its subsequent development across urban landscapes has
become so ubiquitous that we rarely think to question its presence and deployment in the
environments we inhabit.

1
Corresponding Author: Nick Dunn, Imagination, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, LICA Building,
Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster, Lancashire, LA1 4YW, UK. email: nick.dunn@lancaster.ac.uk

The International Journal of Design in Society

Volume 14, Issue 4, 2020, https://designprinciplesandpractices.com
© Common Ground Research Networks, Nick Dunn,
Some Rights Reserved (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Permissions: cgscholar.com/cg_support
ISSN: 2325-1328 (Print), ISSN: 2325-1360 (Online)
https://doi.org/10.18848/2325-1328/CGP/v14i04/19-30 (Article)
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DESIGN IN SOCIETY

Following the birth of artificial illumination, we have used to it create light and, as a result,
sought to reduce if not entirely eliminate darkness. Across the history of different lighting
technologies, the widespread growth in illumination has had a significant impact upon darkness,
often to the latter’s detriment. Schivelbusch (1988), in specific reference to night-time artificial
lighting, observes that perceptions of it throughout history have consistently merged the literal
and symbolic, whilst Schlör (1998, 57) points directly to the dominance of light over darkness
in considering the urban night, “our image of night in the big cities is oddly enough determined
by what the historians of lighting say about light. Only with artificial light, they tell us, do the
contours of the nocturnal city emerge: the city is characterized by light.” During successive
technological developments, many urban environments have become synonymous with the
functional lighting layouts that were installed after World War II. These infrastructures were
largely a response to the growing number of vehicles in urban centers (Nye 2018), with lighting
deployed at regular intervals and usually sited atop poles, i.e., street lamps to provide as much
uniformity as possible. However, despite such attempts, they did not necessarily result in a
coherent nocturnal urban landscape for two principal reasons. Firstly, due to the diversity of
artificial illumination from sources other than street lighting, there could often be significant
variations in levels of brightness and tonality across the built environment (Isenstadt 2018).
Secondly, artificial lighting as it appears in the urban landscape is typically only partially
implemented and situated in relation to contextual characteristics, built up through successive

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interventions that reflect technological developments, which resist consistency and uniformity
(Dunn 2019).
It is important to also recognize that the distribution of these lighting technologies is
intertwined with issues of inequality where the brightly-lit commercial areas contrast with the
dark neighborhoods of the poor, in which darkness quickly became “a symbol and a
determinant of urban differentiation” (Otter 2008, 335) as “old light retreated into the far streets
and lesser known neighborhoods, disregarded and disparaged in relation to the new” (Brox
2010, 104). The recent rollout of LED lighting across cities around the globe bears witness to
this phenomenon as unintended or unforeseen differences endure or reappear by accident rather
than by design. For example, despite the supposed benefits to efficiency in LED lighting
technologies, energy usage for outdoor lighting and artificial night-time brightness continues to
increase annually (Kyba, Hänel, and Hölker 2014). Furthermore, this contemporary transition is
generally altering the tonalities of the light source toward an increasingly blue-white and
directional light than previously experienced in urban landscapes as ecological impacts persist
(Pawson and Bader 2014). Nevertheless, it takes no account of wider transformations in the
built environment including a reduction of vehicles and their travel speeds alongside an increase
in the use of public space for active mobility and social encounters. These changes to urban
illumination are incremental and localized so it is difficult to comprehend the considerably
wider and more complex problems that light pollution causes. In the next section it is useful to
gain a better understanding of the various impacts of artificial illumination so that the need to
address these issues can be appreciated in terms of their global scale.

Human Health and Ecological Impacts of Light Pollution

Light pollution is increasingly being recognized as a global challenge (Davies and Smyth 2018),
the cascading effects of which remain unknown. The issues of light pollution have been
historically connected to urban centers (Meier et al. 2014) as these were usually the places
where the greatest concentrations of outdoor artificial illumination occurred but the extent of the
problems of light pollution are now known to stretch out to the rural night sky. This has already
led to an “extinction of experience” (Pyle 1978; Soga and Gaston 2016) in many contexts
around the world, whereby people are unable to access and appreciate dark skies. This loss has
important consequences, not least since it further complicates the challenge to retain awareness

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of the value of darkness and our relationships with it through our cultures and histories, many of
which were positive. Furthermore, where the weight of cultural meanings and values
concerning darkness frames our contemporary view of it, this tends to reinforce negative
associations.
The presence of light pollution is not, however, just bound up in cultural perceptions and
social behaviors. There is a growing body of evidence regarding the problems light pollution is
creating for human health (Falchi et al. 2011). Exposure to LED lighting, which is increasingly
common in both internal and external environments, has been linked to chronic sleep and
circadian disruptions. Altering our natural cycles of light and dark directly affects the rhythms
of our bodies and minds, with profound health consequences, including: cancer, cardiovascular
disease, diabetes, and obesity (Rijo-Ferreira and Takahashi 2019). As a species, artificial light is
making us less healthy and, in some instances, resulting in extremely serious reactions to it
(Levin 2019). In addition to the issues caused for humans, darkness is integral to biodiversity
and its disappearance is having far-reaching ecological consequences for other species
(Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys 2019; Gaston, Visser, and Hölker 2015). Nocturnal rhythms and
behaviors of flora and fauna are disrupted as artificial light impacts on the sensory capacities of
non-human creatures to breed, prey, feed, and migrate. There have been high-profile cases of
the many migrating birds who, disorientated by electric lights, become victims of “fatal light
attraction” and crash into buildings (Van Doren et al 2017), but the rhythms of insects,

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including moths and fireflies, are also disturbed, as well as migrating sea turtles, bats, beetles,
and salamanders (Rich and Longcore 2006). Research also identifies how coastal and maritime
lighting suppresses the colonization of certain species while promoting harmful others to
flourish that foul harbors, precipitating ecological disaster (Davies et al. 2015). Clearly, the
manifold problems created by light pollution represent a significant challenge that needs to be
tackled urgently and through different approaches. A major barrier to addressing this challenge
lies in the way many of us think of darkness and experience it.

Values and Cultural Meanings of Darkness

Darkness remains misunderstood, frequently placed in an oppositional dynamic with light and
represented as both philosophically and physically inferior to it (Gallan and Gibson 2011). This
binary relationship has continued to have power and influence over the way we think about
darkness as Oliver Dunnett (2015, 622) articulates:

The idea of light, both in a practical and symbolic sense, has come to be associated
with modernization and the so-called ‘Enlightenment project’ in various ways… Here
we can also see how the metaphor of light has taken on a moralizing tone, seen as an
all-encompassing force for good, banishing the ignorance of darkness in modern
society.

This positioning has not gone unchallenged, with the considerable diversity and plurality of
light and dark investigated through various critical lenses that suggest important counter-
histories, meanings and values (Dowd and Hensey 2016; Gonlin and Nowell 2018). These
valuable inquiries are notable for their stance against the dominant dualistic framings of dark
and light, and as lighting technologies have evolved, appear more intertwined with each other.
At present these important alternative histories and new readings of past cultures are a steadily
growing corpus that is still dominated by the negative connotations of darkness. As new studies
concerning the significance of darkness in more recent forms of art and culture emerge
(Bronfen 2013; Elcott 2016) it is evident historical beliefs regarding darkness still cast a long
shadow. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, for example, changes in
attitudes and beliefs toward the night were important in framing perceptions of darkness that

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have typically remained to date (Koslofsky 2011). Transformations in societies gave rise to new
opportunities for labor and leisure, which, coupled with the evolution of artificial illumination
and street lighting, recast the night as an expansion of the day. This widespread extension of
human activity into nocturnal hours profoundly altered many of the positive associations with
darkness that had previously existed. Rather than being embraced, it was viewed as a force to be
banished with light. Tanizaki ([1933] 2001, 41) encapsulated this ongoing development,
suggesting “the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil
lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light – his quest for a brighter light never ceases,
he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.” This confrontational dynamic
between light and dark has been further reinforced through the ongoing colonization of the
night (Melbin 1978), which has essentially portrayed darkness as synonymous with
impoverishment, regression, or unproductive time (Crary 2013). Responding to these negative
connotations, Edensor (2015) has argued it is much more useful and realistic to develop a
relational understanding of light and dark.
These adversarial coexistences, however, are complex as they can reinforce power
relationships, cultural associations and social values depending on the agenda behind them.
Often designated as Western in origin, such binaries are rooted in oppression and violence yet
have persisted through the notion of light being representative of clarity, cleanliness, and
coherence have been transferred around the globe. This pervasive cultural experience has

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significantly contributed to a worldwide decline of the “nocturnal commons” (Gandy 2017).
Perhaps inevitably, as light is deployed to increase visibility and surveillance, in some contexts
this has led to darkness becoming a much-sought-after luxury for the wealthy. It is clear,
therefore, that artificial light and darkness are weighted with contested values and their
interrelationship remains highly political. In her discussion of composite satellite images of the
earth at night, Sara Pritchard (2017) demonstrates that long-held dualities of dark and light
prevail in contemporary readings of urban development and the natural world. This binary
opposition belies the considerable diversity of experiences and qualities to be found within
darkness, drawing them into the widely held conception of the modern night as a consistent
space and time (Williams 2008). It is also evident that the spectacle of artificial lighting
technologies and its relationship with urban darkness has important roles to play beyond
functionality such as its influence on numerous artistic representations of the nocturnal city
(Sharpe 2008). That darkness has been conceived and utilized in historically and spatially
diverse ways only serves to render the urgency and importance of further inquiries to better
understand the manifold cultures, histories and practices that darkness is integral to (Dunn and
Edensor 2020).

Emerging Principles and Practices for Dark Design

The urgency and significance to respond to these issues has been recently highlighted by the
call for a “science of the night” (Acuto 2019) and a global plea by natural scientists and social
scientists for night studies (Kyba et al. 2020). How can design tackle the problems of poor
performance in existing artificial illumination? It seems straightforward enough that designers
can respond by drawing on their knowledge and expertise and improve current lighting products
and services to reduce their negative impacts. Indeed, this approach is already underway as an
important contribution by professionals to establishing ecologically sensitive lighting design
within their practice. However, the question of how we design with darkness also requires us to
reconsider fundamental practices since, “if night means the ephemeral, the fragile, the
spontaneous, how does one construct this element without distorting it? To observe the
cityscape by night means to ask oneself about nocturnal design values” (Armengaud,
Armengaud, and Cianchetta 2009, 12). To respond to this question, I propose the concept of
“Dark Design,” defined here as those principles and practices that aim to design with darkness

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rather than against it. This term encompasses an array of methods that I suggest presents a new
framework for design, characterized by two primary approaches. The first of these includes
those projects that work directly to reduce the impact of artificial lighting through innovative
design strategies. The second of these employ design as form of advocacy through creativity
that seeks to raise awareness and support knowledge exchange on the complex challenges that
light pollution presents. Considering the first approach in this new framework, there have been
a number of projects that have sought to challenge dominant trends in urban lighting design by
showcasing alternatives that can be understood as exemplars of Dark Design. For instance, the
lighting firm Concepto in collaboration with landscape architects Atelier J. Osty & associés and
architects Lionel Orsi developed a master plan for Rennes, France, that integrates “dark zones”
into the city core (Concepto 2012). The shape of the city was deemed advantageous to develop
principles that will introduce darkness into the urban center, with lighting further modulated
according to needs and night-practices. In a similar manner, the recently completed Zaryadye
Park in Moscow designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro deliberately has a very
different nocturnal character than many public parks. The lighting scheme, directed by Leni
Schwendinger, works with the surrounding urban landscape, reflecting pre-existing sources of
light. Through this approach, the park features a diversity of displays and temperature of light
that complement the city and works with darkness rather than trying to banish it (Blander 2018).
Richard Kelly, one of the pioneers of architectural lighting design, drew on his background

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in stage lighting to introduce a scenographic perspective for architectural lighting (Neumann
2010). Challenging the engineering mindset that dominated lighting design in the mid-twentieth
century, he introduced three principles: focal glow, ambient luminescence, and play of
brilliants. Revisiting these principles from the contemporary purview of working with rather
than against darkness, the diversity and subtleties of lighting promoted by Kelly can be
understood to have quickly been lost as urban centers in particular drove artificial illumination
into a competing arena where brightness and power became prized over other lighting
characteristics. This has not gone undetected by lighting professionals as Edward Bartholomew
(2004, 39) succinctly observed, “as I gaze upon over-lit lobbies and malls. I sense that what is
being lit is not the space but merely a fear—legal or otherwise—of the consequence of
darkness.” This practice of over-illumination has also been recognized for the poor design it
represents as Bille and Sørensen (2007, 271) observe, “we generally continue to pursue quantity
at the expense of quality of illumination when technological development is offering so many
new opportunities.” In an attempt to address this problem, The Dark Art Manifesto (2014) by
lighting designers Chris Lowe and Philip Rafael sets out an eight-point proposal for the
profession to reconsider its role and responsibilities. As a premise for change, the manifesto is
promising in its scope and increasingly relevant given the ecological impacts outlined above but
it has yet to gain significant traction within the professional community to date. Therefore, as
the field of ecologically sensitive lighting design continues to establish itself and professional
lighting designers, architects, and urban designers propose new initiatives and innovative
approaches, Dark Design offers a potential identity and community for collaboration and best
practice. What does this mean for the wider design community and its responsibility to such
matters? The next section considers the second approach within the Dark Design framework
that applies creative methods to generate and sustain advocacy concerning the impact of
artificial lighting.

Dark Design as Advocacy through Creativity

Key to this role is the capacity of design to speculate on how the future could be and present
radical alternatives to business-as-usual scenarios. In this context, such an approach would
resonate with Roger Narboni’s (2017) appeal for cities to integrate “dark infrastructures” to
protect and preserve darkness and support green spaces and blue areas such as parks, canals,

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and rivers, by directing their attention away from artificial lighting toward a “nocturnal
urbanism.” Through producing alternative visions for urban places at night that demonstrate
positive ambiances for humans and ecological benefits for other species, design can promote
better public understanding of darkness and redefine the importance of its value and meanings
in the twenty-first century (Dunn 2020). Rather than accept that the different forms of light
pollution are a necessary by-product of urban life, by offering alternatives design can offer
deliberate and positive counterpoints to the prevailing practices of designing against darkness.
This would support better balance in the coexistence between light and dark to “re-orient and
re-energize the excitement and vibrancy of electric illumination and imbue it with new symbolic
meaning that is complimentary to the environmental value of darkness” (Stone 2018).
Emblematic of this approach, several emergent strands of work are appearing that use
advocacy in design as a form of engagement, commitment and action. The first of these strands
is evident in projects which activate citizens to collaborate on societal issues of artificial
lighting in cities. For example, the innovative atNight project by architects Pablo Martinez-Diez
and Mar Santamaria-Varas (2015) in Barcelona proposed the question of the nocturnal
landscape as one of collective responsibility as a catalyst for a participatory approach with the
city’s citizens. The project is notable for its use of big data to reveal the highly localized,
situated and nuanced behavior of people in the city at night so that this information can inform
urban illumination strategies based on these changing patterns rather than one-size-fits-all

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rollout of artificial lighting. This enables advocacy through challenging assumptions about how
cities at night are inhabited and opens up a discourse about consumption patterns.
The second strand concerns those projects that commit to scrutinize policy and its
implementation, in this context in how the standardized measures and regulations of artificial
lighting can be creatively worked with by designers. An insightful example of this approach is
given by Casper Ebbensgaard (2019). Utilizing a case study in East London in the UK, the
supposed constraints of artificial lighting are leveraged to provide frameworks for luminous
variation and the preservation of darkness to be designed within them. In doing so, emergent
alternatives for urban lighting are beginning to take shape that advocate the transition to energy
efficient lighting can be both environmentally and socially sustainable. The third strand is that
which directly engages members of the public and built environment professions with the
nocturnal city to experience for themselves the diversity of darkness and light as a way to
reshape their perceptions of the urban night. For example, the collective nightwalks undertaken
for the Collaborative Urbanism pilot as part of The Avenues major urban regeneration project in
Glasgow, UK, have been developed as a means of discovering latent characteristics of place and
establishing new narratives (Dunn and Dubowitz 2018). These events have been organized to
share the often-neglected or forgotten spaces of the city at different times, to embrace the
positive qualities of darkness and enable citizens to rethink the future narrative of the places
where they live and work.
These emergent stands are united by their efforts to implement positive change in the urban
environment concerning the problems caused by artificial lighting and shape alternative futures
for how we envisage our places can have a better balance between light and dark. In doing so,
they demonstrate engagement, commitment, and action to help shape a wider agenda. They are,
however, nascent examples that are bringing into focus for communities and individuals the
complex societal issues of artificial lighting in urban centers, providing a valuable gateway to
longer term commitment and transformative action for ecological and social sustainability. To
achieve these latter goals, it is clear that design would benefit from a coordinated approach that
can articulate and exchange its knowledge effectively across economic, political, and social
spheres so that the extent of problems and the creative ways in which we can address them are
better understood. Dark Design thus offers a platform for a global community to share its
methods, build an evidence base, and evolve further conceptual models. Given that this article
has introduced the concept of Dark Design as the basis for a new framework to tackle the

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impacts of light pollution, it is useful to consider the potential applications and implications of it
to signal future directions for research and professional practice.
Implications and Applications of Dark Design
The primary aim of the proposed new field of Dark Design is to provide a framework for those
principles and practices that design with darkness rather than against it. Essentially the priority of
such work should be to minimize excessive artificial lighting at night to reduce its environmental
impact. This has a number of implications. First, it shifts the debate around value of artificial
lighting in nighttime environments beyond the solely economic benefit (Henderson 2010). At
present the implementations of energy-efficient lamps is accompanied by a powerful narrative of
savings in economic terms. This focus obscures other important costs, i.e., to the environment,
humans, and non-humans (Haim et al 2019). This implication is crucial if we are to gain a better
understanding of the value of the night sky and nocturnal ecologies. Second, to date the
installation of more efficient artificial lighting has led to increasingly higher levels of brightness at
night (Kyba et al 2017), i.e., the situation is getting worse and will continue to do so unless it is
challenged. This is highly problematic given the degree of ecological damage and extinction of
species that anthropogenic activity has resulted in so far and so questioning prevailing approaches
is imperative. Third, as well as the serious negative impacts on non-human species, excessive

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artificial lighting is known to have major impacts on human health (Chepesiuk 2009). As the
percentage of night work, long hours, and on-call work increases globally, so do the health risks of
sleep and circadian disruptions (SCDs), including cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes,
obesity, and gastrointestinal disorders. Finding alternatives to existing lighting products and
strategies could help contribute to reducing these impacts on human health. Fourth, it enables a
more expansive and nuanced understanding of what the urban night might become (Straw 2014).
The vast majority of discourse surrounding the urban night is related to its economy and as a time
and place for the management of practices of consumption, with all the problems that tend to arise
as a result including anti-social behavior, violence etc. By considering how nocturnal urban
environments might be designed differently to promote positive, non-consumer-orientated
experiences and encounters, it may be possible to begin to recalibrate the relationship between our
lifestyles, our health and the places we live and work.
With regard the applications of Dark Design, a number of potential trajectories are
identifiable. First, it will forge new collaborative relationships between the arts, humanities, social
sciences and the natural sciences for the benefit of both research into and professional practice for
the design of the places we inhabit and share with other species. This is an emerging inter- and
multi-disciplinary field that will require new concepts and methods to reduce our impact on the
planet (Griffiths and Dunn 2020). Second, it will lead to increased public awareness and better
understanding of the hidden global challenge of light pollution. Design and artistic practices are
able to capture and communicate the excess of the world, providing creative and critical methods
that can represent complex issues and make them accessible (Tsing et al. 2017). Third, the
ecological impacts of artificial lighting upon non-human species at night are obviously far more
pronounced in external environments yet the detrimental health impacts of it upon humans in
internal environments are also increasing (Cho et al. 2015). So, although the focus of this article is
on external environments, principally urban landscapes, there is considerable potential for
transferability to internal environments to tackle these health challenges holistically. Fourth, it is
important to remember that our senses and view of darkness are culturally conditioned and bound
up in specific historical, geographical, and social circumstances. Therefore, a key application will
be toward a “sensitive urbanism” (Gwiazdzinski 2015) that recognizes the diversity and existing
inequalities within urban landscapes at night.
Clearly, as an emergent field, the implications and applications for Dark Design outlined
here are presented as possible future pathways. They are intended to stimulate action and

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debate. Given the vast scale and scope of the undertaking expressed here, there will necessarily
be new and alternative ways that will emerge as we make progress on the vital transition needed
for positive global change with regard the manifold negative impacts of artificial lighting. To
conclude, I return to the original premise of this paper and consider the collective responsibility
to the nocturnal commons.
Nocturnal Commons and the Role of Dark Design
For the majority of the world’s population now living in cities, access to dark skies is no longer
possible. This article has highlighted the serious and significant impacts that artificial lighting is
having upon human health, the health of other species, and the ecology of our planet. What is
especially problematic is that many of us now living in urban centers are not aware of this loss,
having largely experienced night assailed by various forms of light pollution. The efforts of
numerous natural scientists and social scientists are increasingly coalescing as the evidence of
the different negative impacts of artificial lighting accumulates. Recent investigations have
promoted the significance of nocturnal cities for imagination and creativity to flourish (Dunn
2016; Foessel 2017) and also shown that the complexity of revaluing darkness, its contested
meanings and power associations urgently requires new cross-disciplinary collaborations
(Edensor 2017; Shaw 2018). Designers, however, has largely been absent from this growing

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cross-disciplinary community. It has been shown that there are increasing attempts to establish
ecologically sensitive lighting and also to develop innovative master plans for public spaces and
parks that work with darkness rather than trying to overpower it. These are important initiatives
that should continue as they demonstrate the value that design can bring to new products,
services and experiences. Where there appears to be an underexplored role for design in
addressing the global challenge of light pollution, as identified in this article, is as a form of
advocacy through creativity. This echoes Le Gallic and Pritchard’s (2019) call to consider the
“making of light/darkness” as a fertile ground for inquiry rather than investigating light in
isolation. By deploying its methods of engaging and empowering people to commit and act
upon complex issues that affect the social, economic, and political spheres of life, design can
make a difference. To achieve this, I have introduced the concept of Dark Design as the basis of
a new framework for those principles and practices that aim to design with darkness rather than
against it. This has been further illustrated by two primary approaches. The first has been shown
to epitomize those projects that work directly to reduce the impact of artificial lighting through
innovative design strategies. The second has sought to illustrate how creative methods can be
applied to generate and sustain advocacy to raise awareness and support knowledge exchange
on the complex challenges that light pollution presents. Both are critical and timely, with
significant potential applications and implications.
The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA n.d.) has been the most significant champion of
darkness with a steadily growing number of designated International Dark Sky Communities,
Parks, Reserves, and Sanctuaries that are managed to protect starry skies and nocturnal habitats by
minimizing light pollution (IDA 2020). These places are not limited to rural landscapes as the
emergence of Dark Sky Towns attest, but it is evident that much more can be done to address the
issues that excessive artificial lighting creates in urban centers. Terrel Gallaway (2015, 280)
summarizes the diverse values of the dark night sky as a “source of aesthetic, scientific and
spiritual inspiration…a natural resource, a scenic asset and part of humanity’s cultural heritage.”
The nocturnal commons should be accessible to the global population, a crucial reminder of our
relationship with the planet and the other species that we share it with. This, of course, requires a
wider global community of public and professionals to be involved as the who in such processes.
Jacques Rancière (2009, 13), explains how making sense of a sense is inherently political since it
concerns, “what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the
talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.” The role of Dark

26
 DUNN: DARK DESIGN

Design, therefore, as a socio-technical bridge that can reach out to different communities and
engage them will be key to unlocking global commitment and action by enabling them to have a
voice in such matters. The impacts of artificial lighting are continuing to increase, making this
need ever-pressing (Zielinska-Dabkowska 2018). As an emergent field of research and
professional practice Dark Design can contribute to this urgent and important challenge through its
capacity to bring new perspectives on the relationship between light and dark and enabling us as a
species to develop a much more nuanced and critical understanding of their coexistence. To
conclude, the role of Dark Design is presented here as a powerful enabler to gain insight into the
situated and complex nature of darkness, to unearth and reconnect with its many positive
attributes, and support ecological and social sustainability. This is an open invitation to the
numerous and diverse design communities and individuals to embrace the opportunities that their
methods empower to unlock new knowledge and find new ways to address the complex problems
set before us that artificial lighting presents.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Professor Nick Dunn: Chair of Urban Design and Executive Director, Imagination, Lancaster
University, Lancaster, Lancashire, UK

30
The International Journal of Design in Society is one

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of six thematically focused journals in the family of
journals that support the Design Principles and
Practices Research Network—its journals, book
imprint, conference, and online community. It is a
section of Design Principles and Practices: An
International Journal.

The International Journal of Design in Society

interrogates the social sources and social effects of
design. Focal points of interest include design policy,
the human impacts of design, design values, and
design as business.

As well as papers of a traditional scholarly type, this

journal invites case studies that take the form of
presentations of practice—including documentation
of socially-engaged design practices and exegeses
analyzing the effects of those practices.

The International Journal of Design in Society

is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal.

ISSN 2325-1328