Living Lights
During the third year of my Bachelor’s studies, I collaborated with a group of students on a project aimed at encouraging Delft residents to contribute more actively to a sustainable community. We started with user interviews in Delft to understand how people were working to reduce their carbon footprint and what motivated them. Our research revealed that a sense of competition between neighborhoods, combined with gamification (rewards) and appealing aesthetics, could play a key role in driving engagement.
Using the Scrum framework, we iteratively developed the “Living Lights” platform, which combined a traveling monolith trophy, an app for tracking and recording energy-saving efforts and carbon footprint reduction, and a small-scale model of Delft. The model responded to real-time CO2 emissions and energy consumption in each neighborhood, lighting up in colors ranging from red to green. This visual representation put each neighborhood’s sustainability efforts on display, using a competitive element to encourage residents to make their community greener.
I played a central role throughout the project - from developing the initial concept of a city model that lights up to serving as Scrum Master and building the physical models of both the Delft cityscape and the monolith trophy. I designed 3D models of various landmarks and hundreds of houses across four Delft neighborhoods. Later, I worked with two team members to code the Arduino program that controlled the neighborhood lights and assembled the model using foam boards, LED strips, and 3D-printed buildings.
