Danny Bettay’s interest in light began during his undergraduate studies in architecture, when an essay – coupled with a deep love of nature – sparked a curiosity that now shapes his PhD research. He explores how light is used, valued, and interpreted across urban systems. For Danny, the city itself is the system, and the streetlight is his lens to explore it. Here, he unpacks how light operates as a multi-system system, and how something as everyday as a streetlight can be a part of complex social, political, and environmental dynamics.
Your PhD is titled Borrowed Light. What was the inspiration behind this title and your research?#
I trained in architecture and as part of that degree I wrote an essay which had the same title as my current research: Borrowed Light. The essay was an exploration into the field of architecture and our reliance on the conditions of environments. I examined Louis Kahn’s beautiful design of the Salk Institute. There’s a small moat in the middle of the facility and, at a certain time of day, the light shines across the water as it trickles down the moat. It’s as if the light is connecting the Salk Institute to the body of water that sits in front of it, but also the mountains behind it – like a kind of connective tissue.
However, as I researched further, there were some debates about its focus on aesthetics over function. I was intrigued by its reliance on the sun, and it made me think about our natural resources and how we can’t control them, instead we borrow them. We don’t control the sun, we don’t control the light, we borrow it, and all the affordances it provides.
When we borrow something, we’re essentially taking it from something else. Similarly, when we create something, like artificial light, we’re introducing it somewhere, to things that don’t necessarily need it, or that may not easily adjust to it. And I think this poses a question around values and ethics and our obligation as designers to think critically about the systems we design and the consequences beyond the first-order impacts (immediate or direct), and the second or third order impacts (the longer-term effects of an action or decision).
Initially my research was going to focus on smart cities but after scoping this out and realising it would have been challenging for several reasons, my PhD supervisor suggested I revisit the subject of light. I chose to focus on streetlights as a vehicle to explore the topic.
Can you explain further why you chose streetlights as the system to focus on?#
We’ve designed streetlights to recreate a natural phenomenon through which we’re extending daytime well into night. My research is looking at how light is used, valued and understood through different parts of the system and that system is a city.
I use Cybernetics because it facilitates our understanding of the relationships between and across complex systems. For example, understanding organisations that influence the uptake and innovation of streetlights as complex systems – where communication and processes like feedback are continually at play – helps us better understand how ideas about the world have a large influence on how these technologies come to exist.
Thinking about this cybernetically, we might consider the influences that have shaped the development of streetlights. This approach requires understanding how we are connected, how we communicate, and how we construct meaning from our interactions with the social, natural and the technological.
We have a 200-year relationship with streetlights and our understanding of the streetlight is it’s a column with an outreach arm and a luminaire that lights the road beneath it. But for almost the last two decades streetlights can do more than just ‘light streets’ – they have temperature sensors and cameras, and are an integral part of the system, capturing data. They’ve become hubs of intelligence able to detect traffic patterns, air quality, weather and can perform automated or intelligent actions. One of my arguments is that streetlights are now multi-system systems. They do more than just illuminate; they support urban governance systems through the information they provide.
I felt it was important we bring this once ordinary and mundane system back into conversations beyond its own discipline. Engineers need to understand how other systems use it, and other systems specialists need to recognise their potential to help effectively design future systems.
How did you end up focusing on adaptive lighting as part of your research?#
Omexom, the systems integrators for the ACT Government, is the company I interned with as part of my PhD. Omexom looks after the ACT’s LED rollout initiative, including the installation and management of streetlights.
There were two phases of the adaptive lighting project, with the first focusing on about 100 streetlights along Athllon Drive, a busy arterial road in Canberra. The sensors on the streetlights determined how frequently the road was being used and from that we were able to determine the times we’d adapt the brightness of the lights, which was from around 11pm to 4 or 5am. It was a live trial, so we had to make sure it was safe, hence why the project was conducted when the roads were quieter.
We were able to reduce the brightness of the lights to 70 per cent of the maximum output level, reducing light pollution by 20 per cent, energy consumption by 15 per cent, and reducing carbon emissions by around 7.83 tonnes after a year of running the project. We were really happy with the results.
After presenting the results to the ACT government we asked if we could conduct a larger trial which they were on board with, but after reflecting further I proposed we conduct an interdisciplinary workshop where we’d invite people from different fields to help design a streetlight plan. Omexom and I didn’t believe a larger trial was something we should be designing in isolation.
The workshop took place in December 2023, and key stakeholders attended, including a minister, director level executives from local and federal government, global streetlight manufacturers, other industry sector representatives, scientists, biologists, ecologists, sociologists, and people who wrote the light pollution guidelines for the Commonwealth Government. The intent of the day was to build a planning scheme, which is a type of urban planning document.
However, after the workshop I realised that as a city, Canberra was not mature enough to understand streetlighting design, as historically the various disciplines involved in their design had been working in silos. The workshop was the first time many of the attendees had been exposed to experts from a range of disciplines. It was the first time they had conversations about risks and benefits and consequences, thereby challenging or confirming their own assumptions or beliefs. So before we could even consider tackling a piece of policy to say, ‘this is what we should do’, I developed a maturity model.
The goal of the maturity model is to capture the diversity of systems that orbit around streetlights to help a designer – whether a developer, company or government stakeholder – navigate all the aspects associated with artificial light at night and consider how it is used, valued and understood by different systems including economic, ecological, biological, environment, sociocultural, technological, and so on.
The maturity model is a way of capturing these considerations in a systematic way to address both intended and unintended consequences. It’s not designed to be universal in terms of the information it provides, but general in how it can be applied to different contexts. Because, outdoor lighting, and by extension, streetlights, should be thought of in the context of each city and the different environments.
What is a key takeaway from this conversation you’d like people to remember?#
I am looking at my research from an ecological perspective, trying to build something that helps the systems that can’t speak for themselves. I love animals and plants.
A lot of the high-level approaches from large commercial and government organisations seem to bundle both ecology and environment under the one ‘environmental’ banner. These approaches predominantly focus on addressing macro-scale environmental concerns – typically around carbon emissions, light pollution and energy consumption – often overlooking the harmful impacts caused at the micro to mesoscale on our ecological systems.
Both ecology and environment are connected so damage to ecological systems has an impact on environmental systems and vice versa. However, at the policy and intervention level, we need to understand that ecology and environment are two separate disciplines that follow different sets of practices, and should be seen differently. We need to understand that balance and keep monitoring and adjusting accordingly.
We know about the negative impacts of light pollution on our health and the environment, and the growing movement to protect dark skies for research, preservation of cultural heritage, and tourism purposes, but there are other ways artificial light has negative impacts.
If we were to stop streetlight skyglow for example, which is one of the biggest problems for light pollution, we would simply shield the lights so it wouldn’t spill out, concentrating light down onto the street. But that doesn’t help the ecological systems on the ground because the light then impacts them.
What interests me about my research project is that it led me away from the purely technical and technological aspects of urban systems. Early in my PhD, my focus was on technology, AI, and cyber-physical systems but streetlights offered a way for me to explore the topic of darkness, which is what I was initially interested in, and shift the focus to values. Streetlights don’t choose where they are placed or what they illuminate, we do. So, the next logical step for us – as humans – is to ask the question that Michael Rosetta from OMEXOM posed to me: “Why do we light the places we do? Is it because we must, or is it because we can?”
For me it’s highlighting what Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro have been saying, which is that we’re in a new era of design where we need to be aware we’re designing systems, not just things anymore and we need to be aware of the impact our designs are having on other systems, in an era of ever-connected network of systems.
Technology is progressing so quickly and in so many ways we need to rethink what we consider critical infrastructure. I argue streetlights are critical infrastructure as they capture and contain so much data and information, providing insights that could be used for a whole range of purposes, including nefarious. Their physical infrastructure also accommodates and impacts many different systems, and their computational and cyber capabilities are also less understood by most users that interact with streetlights on a daily basis. You can’t set and forget when it comes to managing these systems.
What are your plans once you’ve completed your PhD?#
I want to get back in the workforce. I’d love to work in government, in the policy space such as in technology or urban infrastructure policies. I want to look at more of that higher level strategic analysis and implementation of policies in the critical infrastructure space.
I’m also currently trying to work with some of the Pacific Islands on their transition into this new technological era. I’m a Pacific Islander and given my experience in architecture and urban planning and conducting large scale critical infrastructure projects I want to assist with assessing the feasibility of introducing technologies in the Pacific. I want to give them the ability to evaluate and critically think about their uptake of technologies in a way that doesn’t impact our Pacific culture.