Workshop in Lighting design.
The Swedish „Light in Alingsås“ event started in 2000 as an educational programme where students had the opportunity to learn about outdoor lighting from leading lighting experts. Here the public can discover the results of a one week workshop where the teachers support the students to achieve a good aesthetic quality. The festival includes guided tours for the public, performances, as well as classes in garden and home lighting.
The light festival has become an important element for urban development as Thomas Braedikow, Managing Director for the Professional Lighting Designers’ Association, explains: „When Lights in Alingsås started in 1999 the town of Alingsås had around 20.000 inhabitants, today we count around 40.000 residents. Furthermore the structure of the inner city changed and lots of good cafés and restaurants settled during the years, with the Festival in October as their most successful month every year.”
The light event also reveals the technological transformation towards LED lighting, as Thomas Braedikow points out: “The development of technologies changed the structure and content slowly over the years, coming from incandescent light bulb to reflector halogen to LED lighting, from analogue to digital and last but not least the content broadened from architectural lighting to telling a story. ”
In this way Alingsås has become an intriguing example of the way a light festival can naturally grow over years, from a workshop in the beginning to a sophisticated community-wide initiative that has even helped to increase the city’s population.
