Role: The project was done independently, with the guidance of Mustapha Jundi at the Royal College of Art in London.
About the Project
The project is an experiment in citizen sensing using mixed media inspired by the role of weather monitoring devices that record environmental data. The project aims to address the issue of the right of access to sunlight in the setting of the city of London. The outcome was intended to be more visual and creative than accurate.
Keywords: Sunlight, solar-rights, gentrification, densification, citizen-sensing, cyanotype
What is Citizen Sensing?
Simply put, the concept of Citizen Sensing or Participatory Sensing means that communities in the city contribute sensory information to form a body of knowledge.
Citizen Sensing starts from a place of remembering that humans are powerful data sensors that can hear, smell, taste, touch and see.
Why Citizen Sensing?
When individuals and communities are part of designing and building their own kind of sensors (most of them are digital), it helps them to ‘make sense’ of the world around them and take steps to get involved with issues they care about by independently collecting data and change the way we experience cities for the better. It can also help people learn new creative skills and become motivated to make change.
As our cities get ‘smarter’, more digital sensors are appearing in our cities: on lampposts and buses, in our phones, even in litter bins. Sensors are detecting and collecting information about us and our environment, such as motion, temperature, light and noise. But this information is not accessible to us.
My Approach
Instead of taking a digital and accurate approach, I decided to take a creative and playful approach... one that gets your hands dirty! And since the issue I was interested in here was around densification of cities limiting people's access to sunlight, I imagined people going into their windows, backyards or public parks and using their own bodies as sensors.
The Outcome
Distributing Light explores how different objects, including the body itself, can be used as a sensing device to record sunlight in our everyday built environment, indoor or outdoor. This process hints towards a citizen-sensing practice, suggesting a democratised way of measuring sunlight by distributing power into the hands of people. The project hopes to empower people to visualise the amount of sunlight they receive and make the impact visible. The audience of this citizen-sensing practice is especially anyone vulnerable to losing enough access to sunlight as the rising cityscape of London obscures their solar rights.
The Process
The process involved coating a linen cloth with cyanotype ink in a dark room, letting it dry, then wrapping the cloth around the body so that it takes the body's shape. With the cloth wrapped around my body, I let it get exposed in the available sun. After exposure for 20 minutes, I took the cloth off my body and washed the cloth. The cloth then printed the shape of my body, once unfolded.
Exposure in an open environment with abundant sunlight
Exposure A: Cyanotype on linen exposed in direct sunlight, in an open setting December 15, 2022 | From 1230 to 1250—20 minutes
The final print showed a rough shape of my upper body (shoulders, hands, head and the neck) in a blue and white contrast. In essence, it captured the direction of sunlight falling on one side of my body.
Exposure in a dense environment with obscured sunlight
Exposure B: Cyanotype on linen exposed in obscured sunlight, in a dense setting December 15, 2022 | From 1300 to 1320—20 minutes
The second print showed no contrast and didn't record the shape of my body since the dense setting (for 20 minutes) didn't allow enough sunlight to reach the body.
Context
A proposed project in Lambeth promises the largest single office proposal ever seen in Lambeth—1.5 million square feet in 6 huge tower blocks and a tower of residential flats. The plans include bulldozing Waterloo Farm and Lambeth’s oldest school buildings, which accommodate dozens of small creative businesses in the unique space of Old Paradise Yard. Not to mention that these buildings will also be looming over the Archbishop’s Park, blocking out the sky and dwarfing its magnificent trees.
Sunlight has always played an important role in the design of human settlements. Well designed urban structures, more so in moderate or cold climates should be assured of direct sunlight not only in indoor living spaces, but also in public spaces. Many problems in the exercise of rights of access to sunlight can arise when sunlight is blocked by a tall cityscape. Many countries and cities regulate solar access, but solar rights and landowner rights are in a permanent conflict. The right to access and even harvest sunlight as an energy source is a crucial human right.
Table Reference: Approaches, Methods and Tools of Rights of Access to Sunlight around the World by Jozef Hraska.
The harm caused by absence of such rights stays invisible and to see the impact of the harm is difficult as there’s no way for citizens to observe it themselves. To count a few:
➔ In indoor spaces, measuring sunlight can make possible to prevent new construction that obfuscates access to sunlight
➔ Less sunlight = More energy consumption, spending more on electricity and gas bills
➔ Less sunlight = Less leverage for solar energy generation
➔ In construction, measuring sunlight can make possible to choose the ideal exposure and set comparative pricing on houses
Research Questions
Based on the above considerations, I started with some research questions.
➔ Can measuring sunlight empower people to prevent their solar rights in anticipation of new construction in the vicinity of their everyday spaces?
➔ Can democratising sunlight measurement help set a standard in determining prices/value of buildings?Like an energy efficient building costs more, for example.
➔ Can measuring sunlight help people calculate energy saving/spending?
➔ Can data collected from sensing allow for visualising a “light map” of a house or park?
The experiment wasn't supposed to answer all the questions, but set direction for the explorations.
Other experiments made in the process
The process involved various smaller explorations to capture the direction and the relational amount of sunlight using cyanotype on paper, cloth and also generating graphs from photometer readings.
Inspiration
http://www.italianlimes.net/project.html Sensors installed on the Italo-Austrian border allows the visitors of the exhibition to print a real-time map of the shifting borders along with a timestamp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAIhO_olcDg Sun maps for improving home gardening.