Theoretical Foundations of Designing for Darkness

This paper sketches the theoretical foundations of designing for darkness. Drawing from (lighting) design theory, philosophy of technology, and environmental ethics, it argues that we have an opportunity to re-examine the meaning and experiences of darkness, exploring why and how we should protect or re-introduce darkness into urban nightscapes – not as a constraint, but a constructive goal for urban lighting. It is further positioned as a formative, not prescriptive, framework: bounding and guiding a flexible design process, and able to inform different strategies and approaches. Framed in this way, three core principles are outlined that serve as moral and aesthetic goals for urban lighting. The first is aspirational, situating ‘darkening cities’ as a type of urban (ecological) restoration akin to greening cities. This requires seeing urban darkness as a critical natural infrastructure that can bring both material and social benefits. The second is evaluative, specifying the value-level design requirements to be fostered in urban nightscapes. Lighting strategies should, as a prima facie obligation, promote and preserve the values of darkness. The third principle is experiential, exploring how strategies can create the conditions for positive experiences of – and engagement with – urban darkness. In combination, they offer a means to specify darkness as a design requirement, as well as a reflexive tool to assess and refine the overarching theory of designing for darkness.


Light pollution and the future of cities after dark
The growing recognition of light pollution has spurred research into how policy and design can incorporate new, transdisciplinary approaches to mitigate adverse effects [1][2][3][4].However, despite evidence and awareness of the ecological, economic, and cultural impacts of light pollution, our urban nights continue to get brighter.A multi-year citizen science study has shown that previous estimates of a 2-3% annual increase are incorrect; due largely to the rapid introduction of LED outdoor lighting, the current rate of increase is likely closer to 10% [5].This seems to confirm worries that the rapid proliferation of LEDs could lead to an increase in brightness and energy use, as it offers a more efficient means of producing artificial light and is therefore susceptible to rebound effects [6][7][8].
This points to the continued need for ongoing inter-and-transdisciplinary research into the effects of artificial light at night, alongside new policies at municipal, regional, and national levels to curb light pollution.It also speaks to the need for innovative approaches to urban lighting, and more generally novel visions for the future of cities at night.Otherwise, we risk becoming locked-in to a new generation of outdoor lighting that exacerbates negative impacts and fails to realise sustainable urban (nighttime) futures.1320 (2024) 012001 IOP Publishing doi:10.1088/1755-1315/1320/1/012001 2 One idea that has been gaining momentum is the re-conceptualisation of darkness as a positive and desirable feature of nightscapes -coalescing around the theories of dark design and designing for darkness [9][10][11][12][13][14][15].This represents a profound shift in thinking, for while architecture and lighting design have a long history of designing with darkness and shadow, darkness is here imbued with positive moral and aesthetic significance.Dark design has been proposed as a strategy that strives to both reduce the impacts of light pollution, as well as raise awareness about this environmental issue [10].Designing for darkness has the added layer of positioning darkness as a constructive target within urban lighting policy and design.It can be understood as a broad and inclusive design theory that works to align and inform a variety of methods and practices.
The goal of this paper is to offer a first sketch of the concepts that unite and drive designing for darkness as a design theory.It will not analyse specific design methods or case studies or delineate rigid boundaries.Nor will it delve into practical considerations, such as the role of stakeholder engagement or its translation into actionable policies.Rather, it will focus on what exactly it means to conceptualise and specify darkness as something to design for.Designing for darkness is in many ways an exercise in problem framing [16] -of re-framing the problem of light pollution away from what is bad about artificial light and towards what is good about darkness.It is an opportunity to re-examine darkness, exploring why and how we should protect or re-introduce it into our urban nightscapes.In this way is it focused on developing a foundation for designing for darkness, which can inform downstream policymaking and design practice.
Towards this goal, insights will be drawn from the philosophy of technology, which offers tools for translating (environmental) values into design requirements.Such an approach moves away from a constraint-oriented framing, instead asking how darkness can become a constructive and generative target for technical, policy, and design innovations.Critically, this positions darkness as not just as a quantifiable item, but a guiding value with moral and aesthetic weight.To operationalize as a design theory, designing for darkness is defined via three interrelated principles that are aspirational, evaluative, and experiential.In combination, they offer a theoretical foundation for different strategies aiming to reimagine the role of darkness in urban lighting (and more generally cities at night), and provide a means to critically and creatively advance sustainable lighting strategies.

Ethics by design: values and technology
Understanding the formative role lighting technologies play in shaping cities at night, and in turn shaping urban darkness, allows for a better understanding of how lighting strategies can attend to darkness in rich and nuanced ways.For this, recent developments in philosophy of technology -in particular, technological mediation and design for values -provide useful starting points for interrogating humantechnology-environment relations.
Both approaches are concerned with the ethical dimensions of technologies, and the relationship between artifacts and moral values.While technology design and development has historically been viewed as a value-neutral endeavour, this has been questioned since at least the seminal article 'Do Artifacts Have Politics?' by Langdon Winner [17] in which he argued that "… technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of ordering human activity.Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time…" Winner showed that seemingly benign artifacts, such as a highway overpass, can in fact be used as a political tool -causing social impacts well beyond any narrow instrumental function.While the specific examples presented by Winner have been subject to debate, he nevertheless opened a new way of investigating technological artifacts: not via technical functions, but rather their relation to social values.
More recently, technological mediation has further developed these insights to highlight the profound influence that technologies have in our lives.It interprets our actions and perceptions as "always closely interwoven with the material environment in which they play out" [18].Technology is not something out there to be dealt with.Instead, our interactions and uses of technological artifacts play an active role in constituting our reality.Hence, we experience the world -and morality -through or by way of technological artifacts.In co-constituting our understanding of the world, technologies can make explicit issues that were not apparent (or even possible) before, moving them from the taken-for-granted backdrop of moral decision-making and into ethical debates.
While mediation provides a description of the moralizing role of technology, a normative and actionoriented approach has been developed through the interrelated theories known as value sensitive design and design for values [19][20].This includes a variety of different methodologies but is united by a few key tenets.First, that technologies are not value-neutral, but can embody and/or impact social and environmental values.Second, that value considerations should be explicitly and proactively included in technology development, design, and associated policymaking.As such, value-sensitive approaches actively strive to situate moral values as "supra-functional" design requirements, effectively striving to operationalise ethics through design processes [21].Third, they take an interactional stance with regards to technology and values -rather than being deterministic, value-sensitive approaches posit that "individuals, organisations, or societies shape the tools and technologies they design and implement; in turn, those tools and technologies shape human experience and society" [19].
Value sensitive design was originally developed in relation to information and communication technologies and individual artifacts.More recently, it has been expanded and refined as a means to surface values in urban technologies, showing that it is necessary to understand the historical developments and inherited symbolism that urban technologies carry, as new innovations are layered over past choices and material conditions [22].For urban lighting, this means appreciating the legacy of values -such as safety, social order, and progress -that were foundational to the formalisation of public lighting and continue to influence lighting choices well beyond any quantifiably 'needed' lighting.It is also critical to appreciate that urban technologies often do not have discrete boundaries but are influenced by other artifacts, systems, and infrastructures.For example, the introduction of autonomous vehicles into cities will impact the uses and need of streetlighting.Through such analyses, we can appreciate what is valuable at a certain time and place, and how to respond in conscientious and creative ways.The proliferation of artificial light and the rising awareness of light pollution necessitates a reconsideration of the meaning of urban darkness and its presence and qualities in cities at night.
To summarize, the philosophy of technology reveals two key ideas.First, that our perceptions and experiences of (urban) darkness are co-constituted by our artificial lighting.This means that designing for darkness requires attention to lighting, as it will be formative to our experiences of, and relationship with, darkness.The second is that we can proactively strive to design for specific environmental values, which requires a conceptualisation of said values as part of an iterative design process.

Principles of designing for darkness
Designing for darkness as conceptualised here is not a prescriptive framework.It does not impose specific steps or actions, nor does it provide a checklist or minimum thresholds to satisfy.It is not meant to be instrumentalized as an add-on to existing approaches.Rather, it is a formative framework, bounding and guiding a flexible design process [19].It should be a reflexive and evolving approach that can encapsulate different strategies, technologies, and outputs.Designing for darkness can therefore be understood as heuristic tool for re-thinking the relationship between lighting and darkness in urban nightscapes.Framed in this way, three core principles are proposed to serve as moral and aesthetic guides for urban lighting strategies: darkening cities as urban restoration, darkness as value-level design requirements, and rewilding nocturnal atmospheres (table 1).Each will be elaborated in turn, and finally their interrelation within design processes will be briefly discussed.

Table 1.
Three principles outlining the theoretical foundations of designing for darkness.

Principle
Purpose Description

Aspirational
Overarching goal for urban futures; darkness positioned as a natural infrastructure, and darkened cities as a new ideal

Darkness as value-level design requirements
Evaluative Normative framing of darkness; identifying the values that can be achieved by urban darkness, formulated as prima facie obligations

Rewilding nocturnal atmospheres
Experiential Phenomenological and design considerations; bring positive experiences of darkness into cities, use lighting to foster an ecological and cosmological sense of place

Darkening cities as urban restoration
As an overarching aspirational goal, darkness can be situated as a type of urban (ecological) restoration.
In this sense, 'darkening cities' can be seen as akin to 'greening cities.'More generally, this aligns with contemporary approaches that seek to bring nature back into cities and collapse built-natural dichotomies, such as biophilic design [23].Darkness and/or dark skies can be situated as a 'natural infrastructure' to be integrated into urban fabrics -a perspective arguably underlying the concepts of dark infrastructures and dark ecological networks [24][25][26].Critically, darkening cities is about a more foundational ideal underlying such approaches; it is about finding a new story about urban darkness.Surfacing new narratives around urban darkness requires shifting thinking away from negative associations with danger or fear, and towards seeing darkness as a source of positive environmental value [12,15,27].To do so, we can consider darkening cities as an act of repair, with both a material and social function [28].Materially, darkening cities can restore or preserve urban ecologies in the service of urban sustainability.Like other natural infrastructures, such as green spaces, darkened cities can reduce energy consumption while improving biodiversity and the well-being of citizens.Yet, a darkened city also carries an interrelated social dimension, offering the possibility of restoring an ecological and cosmological sense of place -something elaborated further in the third principle.Importantly, this makes the goal of darkening cities more than simply repairing an infrastructure, or even of restoring nocturnal ecosystems; it is also repairing our relation to urban darkness and the night sky [29].
This requires a conscientious and judicious use of lighting, but can also be a source of inspiration and creativity.Just as attempts to green cities explore how urban innovations can create the conditions for urban ecosystems to flourish at a variety of scales -or perhaps just step back to 'let nature back into cities' -aspiring towards a darkened city can likewise stimulate new innovations and interventions into urban nights.It can be situated as an ideal to guide our thinking about what sorts of urban futures we aim to strive towards, and why.The following two principles work to further articulate how such a vision can be further specified.

Darkness as value-level design requirements
Darkening cities provides an aspirational goal for the future of urban nightscapes.A next step is the specification of value-sensitive design requirements in order to consider what values can be fostered or preserved in different contexts.This can provide an evaluative tool that further delineates what we should be achieving with our lighting plans and strategies in order to move towards a darkened city.For this, the impacts of ecological and atmospheric light pollution can be reframed and categorised into ways in which value is derived from darkness [15].This process surfaces nine values that encapsulate the environmental goods we strive to realise in urban nightscapes.Each value can be considered as a prima facie obligation to promote, protect, or pursue (table 2).This means that there is a morally relevant reason to uphold or strive to achieve these values, and in the absence of other considerations it would be a responsibility to do so.However, prima facie obligations are not categorical obligations -it can be that they are not achievable in every circumstance.For example, while efficiency should always be a consideration, a lighting plan for a public square in a densely populated city likely cannot itself achieve stellar visibility.Yet, creative uses or design interventions in such a space could at least offer modest ways to connect with nature via darkness -a motivation for the third principle.We therefore must consider which values are achievable and relevant, and to what degree, on a case-by-case basis.The values of darkness can then be used to proactively create site-specific design requirements [30], as well as inform novel frameworks for evaluating realized projects [31].
Positioning the values of darkness as moral obligations creates an important re-framing in effectively flipping the burden of proof.Rather than arguing for light pollution reduction as an add-on to existing policies and practices (i.e., minimising negative effects), it makes darkness a foundational consideration.The proof must be to show why it is good or better not to uphold or promote these values, or alternatively why it is not possible to achieve them due to contextual limitations.Table 2. Nine values of darkness as prima facie obligations, adapted from [15].

Value of darkness
Design obligation for lighting policy and design

Efficiency
The efficient and optimal use of illumination; avoiding waste or excess

Sustainability
The responsible use of lighting for future-generations (preserving non-renewable resources)

Ecological conservation
Protect and preserve of nocturnal habitats; create conditions to promote biodiversity

Healthiness
Promote and foster human health and well-being via benefits of dark spaces and light-dark cycles

Happiness
Promote and foster emotional well-being through access to dark spaces and the natural night sky

Connection to nature
Create opportunities to connect with the more-than-human world

Stellar visibility
Preserve conditions for accessing and experiencing the starry night sky

Heritage
Preserve the cultural heritage and traditions associated with the night sky for future generations Nocturnal sublime Preserve and foster the wonder and beauty of both urban nightscapes and the natural night sky

Rewilding nocturnal atmospheres
The values of darkness offer a means to specify the ideal of a darkened city into design requirements.The final principle is concerned with the lived experiences of urban nightscapes, and how lighting technologies could be utilised creatively.This moves closer to design practice, asking what qualities should motivate lighting strategies and design interventions.Building on the first two principles, rewilding nocturnal atmospheres focuses on creating conditions for positive experiences of darkness, and, if possible, dark skies.For this, a re-imagining of urban nocturnal ambiances is required that strives to look beyond binary or dualistic thinking, instead exploring different qualities and relations between light and dark [32].Drawing from the insights of technological mediation, we can appreciate that how we choose to design the qualities of urban nights and the relationship between darkness and lighting therein is a formative act.It can either reify the negative connotations of darkness or challenge them.It can reinforce the view that dark skies are only possible 'out there,' or subtly question built-natural dualistic thinking [32][33][34][35].Such interventions can not only create more convivial and nature-inclusive cities; they can create conditions for city inhabitants to see a taken-for-granted aspect of the natural world otherwise within the spaces inhabited daily, and in the process foster new relations with the more-than-human world.
Critically, this points towards a re-thinking of the meaning and qualities of urban darkness.It is not only about the reduction or absence of artificial illumination, but rather how lighting reacts to the IOP Publishing doi:10.1088/1755-1315/1320/1/0120016 qualities and conditions of a specific time and place.A particularly interesting avenue is how novel lighting technologies could be utilised to respond to changing ambient conditions.This can include the rhythms and temporalities of natural cycles [36] or attuning lighting to natural light sources [37].What these approaches offer is a means of bringing some wildness back into our cities in a way that extends current thinking about urban rewilding [38].First, it does not position technologies as antithetical to nature, but rather strives for an alignment of urban technologies with ecological and cosmological rhythms and processes.Second, by focusing on urban spaces it can aid in the process of human rewilding [39].Many rewilding efforts effectively treat the symptom and not the cause.Humans need to be included in these processes -not just as stakeholders, but requiring some rewilding themselves.In doing so, lighting can create conditions for synergistic rewilding of urban nights, as they are human interventions that contribute to flourishing ecosystems [40].Further, they will open novel aesthetic experiences that can serve to re-imagine how and why we illuminate our world after dark.Such interventions, if successful, reinforce the relational aspect of repairing urban nights central to the notion of a darkened city.

Designing for darkness as iterative process
As a formative framework and heuristic guide to design processes, each principle is purposely left openended.They can be further refined based on the scale and scope of projects, as well as the stakeholder engagement and site analysis methods utilised in individual design processes.Internally, the three principles can be understood as embedded and layered.Darkening cities outlines an aspirational goal to strive towards; the values of darkness offers a means to proactively assess and specify site-specific requirements; and nocturnal atmospheres focuses on the aesthetic experience and associated design choices that can realise identified values.Used in combination, these three principles offer an iterative approach that allows for a back-and-forth between specification and reflection regarding the successes and/or impacts of designing for darkness (figure 1).

Conclusion: searching for darkness
This paper sketches the foundations of designing for darkness as a lighting design theory.Importantly, this is not meant to be a final, definitive statement; rather, a first step that can be refined and iterated upon as new scientific knowledge emerges and relevant methods and practices evolve.It draws from the philosophy of technology to situate designing for darkness as a formative framework and heuristic IOP Publishing doi:10.1088/1755-1315/1320/1/0120017 guide that can inform a variety of methods and approaches.Three principles are presented which, in combination, can allow for an iterative process of specifying design requirements and reflexively examining their success in achieving identified goals.As the theoretical foundations and downstream practical interventions of designing for darkness continue to evolve, it will ideally offer a tool for reimagining of the future of cities after dark.
Aligned with the notion of a formative framework, but perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, no formal definition of darkness has been provided.Darkness is typically defined as the partial or total absence of light, which says very little about the qualities of darkness itself.Here an alternative means of understanding darkness is offered -not as essential or static, but rather mediated by technologies, inherited symbolism, and social context.This highlights a continued need for reflexivity in the theory and practice of designing for darkness.Lighting technologies, as with many other large-scale infrastructures that are arguably responsible for the Anthropocene, now actively shape their own operating environment [28].This creates a feedback loop, as any interventions into urban nightscapes will necessarily change the relative meaning and importance of darkness.In adopting an interactional stance to the co-evolution of technology and values, this is to be expected.Artificial lighting, and more generally cities at night, will continue to shape -and be shaped by -how we evaluate and experience darkness.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.The principles of designing for darkness as a layered and iterative design process.