Grace Hwang
Trapped Light Society
Class of: 2023
Major: Illustration BFA
Medium: Mixed and recycled materials such as cardboard, paper, flashlight, cup, etc.
Faculty: Juanli Carrion
Prompt: For the prompt of this project, it focused on creating a toolkit with three tools that's for a specific system or community and used design as a way to address a wicked problem of our choice. For me, one of the wicked problems that frustrate me the most is light pollution.
Light pollution is mostly an unheard of pollution compared to water pollution and air pollution. This is why I wanted to create this toolkit. My goal for creating this toolkit is to bring awareness about this pollution. And to create an awareness about light pollution, I decided to create an interactive, educational toolkit for children and adults. The desired effects of this toolkit and its elements are to make people well-informed about light pollution and its solutions. The basic shape of the toolbox is a light switch with the words “ON” and “OFF” (with my logo) to set a reminder and a message for the people who are using this toolbox to turn off their artificial light at night because this can be easily solved with a literal “flip of a switch”(but opposite). To let the users of my toolkit further learn more about this pollution, I created a zine as one of my tools that talks about light pollution itself, the harmful effects of light pollution, and the solution to this wicked problem. To make it more fun, interactive, and educational toolkit for children, I decided to make a fun tool where it involves flashlight with a circular plate with star cutouts attached to the front of the flashlight to address how the artificial light are now our stars. Inspired by Bortle scale, I decided to make a shorter and more conceptual piece of the scale by creating five illustrations of the different environments and their amount of artificial light. I feel like doing this made me realize how much design plays a role in creating an impact on things that people wouldn’t really know about such as light pollution.