User interaction with everyday lighting systems

New lighting technologies create new opportunities that may contribute to people’s experience of light. These opportunities are a result of the increased variety and freedom in terms of color, form factor and connectivity of the lights. To allow people to fully benefit from the potential of such novel lighting systems, there is a need for a new user interaction paradigm. To develop this paradigm we have to better understand the aspects that play a part in the interaction with lighting, paying special attention to people’s motivation for interaction. This paper reports on a context-mapping study that was performed to gain insight in these aspects. As result, we present a set of seven themes that regard the interaction with lighting in the current situation and in the future. These themes provide an overview of the relevant aspects in this domain, and contain considerations and opportunities for the design of new interfaces for novel lighting systems. We conclude that people have different levels of lighting-needs that are highly dependent on context, and that also require control at different levels. The context and lighting needs have a large influence on the extent to which people are motivated to adjust their lighting. Moreover, the lighting interface itself has a large effect on this motivation, mainly influenced by the degrees of freedom, the control location and availability, the degree of automation, and general interaction qualities.