Waves of Data: Illuminating pathways with San Leandro Lights

With Brittney Silva’s tragic May 2014 death fresh in everyone’s memory, the city of San Leandro began collaboration efforts between them and University of California, Berkeley to do something to make the city safer for pedestrians. A course was developed at UC Berkeley called Sensing Cityscapes, offered Fall 2015, aiming to collect data about human activities too often ignored. As part of the interdisciplinary UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative, the class aimed to harness methods not just from city planning, engineering, and architecture, but from the humanistic disciplines, cognitive science, art, public health, and performance studies, bringing students together from each field. We now are bringing the installation back to the streets of San Leandro with the support of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Our Town grant for a project called San Leandro Lights. Transferring the project from the lab back to the street, we hope that the positive effect for individuals we observed in the lab will remain, and that responsive lighting will create a dynamic culture of attention.