The Idea
As I was walking home across the beautiful Harvard Bridge towards Boston, I was thinking about the assignment for this week’s class and what I can do about light. What caught my eye was the famous Berkeley building’s weather beacon. It was shining a steady blue telling to me that tomorrow will be a clear sky. The striking thing about this to me was that within something as random and chaotic as a cities skyline, there was information being presented in the form of light; a signal of some sort. And I thought (abstracting further), at a fundamental scientific level, light is information. Light allows us to receive some real information about the world like an input and output of a physical system. As a signal, it has the power to make us feel, act, and think differently about the world. So for this week assignment I wanted to explore the theme of light as a signal at various levels and uses in relation to our world.
The Models
The Digital: 1010s
Even at it's purest form as a digital signal, light is able to take various forms based on the context, culture that the user attributes it to. The form it takes depends on the system and enviorment that we are in.
Light as wave/data. of 10101010s indicating the transmission of data. If this was moorse code, it would represent another language in this context.
Light as an output. A signal light this could indicate warning. In a different context, or culture it could mean something else.
Light as an input. There is a sensor that picks up the light signal from the signal and output a signal accordingly This duality of light as an input as well as an output is fascinating. It both is the enviorment itself and a control of the enviorment.
The Physical: Manfiestations
Light as a signal is able to manifests itself from the digital world to the physical world in various forms that allow us gain meaning and context to our physical enviorment.
A beacon of the sky. The Berkeley building's weather signal manfiests itself as part of the architecture of the building. Hidden yet revealing, we see a duality where the signal describes physical the enviorment (sky), but it is as a part of the physical enviorment (a beacon in the skyline). The light signal also highlights the building, bring it a sense of importance and practicallity to the city of Boston.
The traffic light is the godfather of the streets. Ubiquitous throughout the world, it brings a sense of structure and flow to physical enviorment. It is nothing more than a digital signal manfiested into physical our world but yet it can make us late for work. At the visual level, the colors of red, green, yellow as signals have become the standard across cultures as well. More information here
The Visual: Art + Symbolism
At it's most abstract visual form, light takes on different meaning across different cultures. It makes can make us feel connected to the thing that it is representing.
Light as a signal for spirtuality. Stained glass is an art form that combines spirtuality and light. This is a picture from the Church of Annunciation in Nazereth, Israel. The various colored used in the stain glass can mean various things as well. Red can represent the blood of Christ. Gold can mean divinity and spirtual success. Also, there is a inner sense of spirtuality when the natural light comes through that seperates it from the digital and the physical manifiestation of light itself. More information here
The Dark Side of the Moon - Any Colour You Like Light, as we can see it in our enviorment, is the visual spectrum made up of various colors. This the purest display of light that we know of. Different colors can signal to us different ideas, different meanings and different symbols. For example, red can mean fortune, lust or rage depending on culture and how it is used in various context. More information here
Google Design Language
All things consider, light as a signal at the various levels influences the way we percieve and interact with the world, especially when it comes to UI and Visual display.
