Daylight Investigations

Paint With Light

Students

Mengyao Dina Lin, Yaoxin Chen, Yaoxin Chen

Teachers

Ryosuke Imaeda

School

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Country

United States

Paint With Light
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Project Description

As the ongoing 2019 Novel Coronavirus, a person-to-person respiratory illness that has a long incubation period, severely and rapidly spreads out throughout the world, everyone’s life has been severely affected by the social distancing rule during the time. Nowadays, we are no longer able to attend classes in school in the normal way, we cannot hang out with our friends, even the most prosperous cities in the world are “paused” to ensure citizen’s safety. We live in a way with the invisible barriers of 6 feet radius, worrying of being too close to friends or strangers. The raising of this completely new living style had caused depressions, anxieties, or even violences in the communities, in the world we love. With the brightness, the warm feeling, and the sense of hope of sunlight, we want to waken the deep bond among us in this visible and physical way. Our design to the sunlight is a highly interactive device for public spaces. Using sunlight to unveil the external filter of the current pandemic and envision the true cohesion and the social collective consciousness of people, to allow people to have interaction in a safe, warm, and relaxing way at this hard time, and to provide such ambient helping to rebond the community. Every individual space is designed to have 6 feet in radius with each other, which serves as social-distanced pavilions. People could install our app “Like the light, I am here with you” and interact with the real-time facility in their room. On the ground, each designed space is surrounded by a ring reflector with a radius of 6 feet which receives signals from the app and physically works as a social distancing sign. When the app finds 2 people tap the button that says “Let me light you” on the homepage of the app, the reflector will reflect sunlight to the prism in a timely manner. Then, the light will be refracted into colors of rainbows and reflected back to the ground by the top mirror, generating a real-time colorful painting of light on the ground for approximately 10 seconds. Thus, with the brush of the properties of light, we aim to create interactive public facilities with the people living in the nearby building, to console people under the pandemic. On the facade of each individual space, numerous apertures are allocated in various directions. Correlating with the layer of glowing fabric under the roof, the pavilion redirects stored sunlight to its surroundings, and creates the painting of light with spots and interlaced beams of light among the individual spaces. In such a way, this light painting lets the people who are walking among the distanced spaces and live in nearby buildings feel the warm ambient and the inner bound of all of us. In the stagnancy of the prosperous city, the painting of light revitalizes the commercial areas that used to have beautiful and stimulating lightings, adding positive feelings to the citizens.