We proudly celebrates Byeongjin Kim’s (김병진) achievement, where his study, previously published in The Journal of the Korean Society for Emotion and Sensibility (감성과학), received the Best Research Award. His article investigates the stylistic factors of light and lighting, emphasizing how personal and often overlooked everyday experiences with light can inform new creative directions in design.

Motivated by the richness of human light-related memories, Byeongjin built a structured database that captures perceptual impressions and distilled them into five stylistic factors. Supported by text generation and illustrative imagery, the study offers a fresh perspective for designers seeking expressive and emotionally grounded lighting concepts. Congratulations to Byeongjin on this meaningful achievement!

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14695/KJSOS.2024.27.3.71

Abstract

Lighting is increasingly utilized as a design element that provides emotional experiences and enhances affection. This study analyzes the emotions elicited by light and lighting and proposes new scales for the emotional characteristics of light. Through a survey, impressive experiences related to light were collected, and adjectives used to describe light from each experience were extracted. A survey conducted with 47 experienced lighting designers yielded 355 examples of impressive lighting experiences, from which 142 adjectives were extracted, and 43 were selected as evaluation criteria. Using this criteria, 23 participants evaluated 221 lighting examples. Factor analysis derived five factors: ‘Mystique’, ‘Naturalness’, ‘Excitement’, ‘Elegance’, and ‘Smartness’, each composed of various adjectives representing diverse emotional characteristics of lighting. The results shall provide guidelines for product and space designers to effectively convey desired emotions and affections through lighting.