ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the author’s professional experience of working in the lighting industry and, in particular, his collaboration with dark sky communities. It discusses three projects to illustrate how lighting approaches can be developed through such collaboration to inform schemes that are sympathetic to dark skies goals. By promoting the benefits of dark skies to support the design of more varied, more sustainable, and more aesthetically pleasing nocturnal environments, these examples seek to demonstrate how we might design with the dark in an effective manner. In highlighting how the design of illumination schemes for dark sky places is guided by specific, place-based aesthetic and material qualities, environmental imperatives, social agents, and political contexts, the chapter contributes to practical ways in which we can rethink and reconfigure the relationship between light and dark.
