SoI

Overview

System of Interconnection (SoI) is a responsive, contextual lighting system for urban living spaces. A switch is disembodied from the light it produces. An occupancy sensor is a switch with a trigger: a binary check, at one instant, that someone is there. SoI replaces both with light that is continuous and relational — computed at every moment from where each inhabitant is, what kind of inhabitant it is, and the conditions of the room.

Every inhabitant, human or plant, carries a lightfield: a halo the surfaces of the room render as it moves. People leave trails that decay at a rate set by the room’s temperature and humidity. Plants glow with a slow pulse; when one is under stress, the light around it dims and browns, and the fields of nearby humans bend toward it. The ceiling carries the sun’s position and the weather outside. None of it is a display or a notification. The room’s light becomes a continuous representation of who is in it and the conditions it is in.

SoI was my thesis for two MFAs at Parsons School of Design — Design and Technology, and Lighting Design — completed in May 2024. It was exhibited as a miniature scene: a wall, a plant, a lamp, and a live temperature and humidity sensor driving all three.

Concept

SoI is speculative by design, situated roughly a decade out. It assumes a home in which every luminaire is addressable and networked — the trajectory domestic lighting is already on — and in which light engines have the resolution, color accuracy and output to render fine gradients across a wall. It asks what that infrastructure should be for, before it arrives and defaults to a voice command.

The design question: How might a tech-enabled urban living space become a dynamic, phenomena-inspired ecosystem, responsive to triggers co-generated by its inhabitants and by the spatial and temporal qualities of its built environment?

The answer rests on three principles. Body-centric: interaction begins with the body’s position and movement, not with an intention spoken to a device, so the point of interaction and its effect are the same place. Inhabitant- and process-oriented: the space is shaped by all of its inhabitants, non-humans included, and the light reflects that plurality of agency. Environment-engaged: the conditions of the environment, indoors and out, modify how the system behaves.

From these comes a vocabulary, and the vocabulary is the real proposal. Every inhabitant has a lightfield, a field of agency around its body. Humans and animals — independent inhabitants — carry a field like a point source. Plants and aquariums — dependent inhabitants — carry a slower field that encodes their activity. The surfaces of the room are lightscapes: the Horizon on the walls, the Sky on the ceiling, a Bubble at each plant. Where a lightfield meets a lightscape it forms a spectre; as an inhabitant moves, the spectre leaves a trail. Environmental modifiers — temperature, humidity, air quality, solar angle, weather — change how spectres form and how quickly trails decay, so the same movement reads differently on a dry afternoon and a humid evening. When a dependent inhabitant is under stress, its field encroaches on the lightscape, fading and browning the way a leaf does, and the fields of nearby humans are pulled toward it. Attention is directed spatially, through the light itself, rather than through an alert.

The precedents SoI positions against each fall short in one way. Bio-installations that sense plants but never answer them are unidirectional. Sky-simulating ceilings that run a fixed animation do not know the weather. Horticultural systems treat the plant as production. The smart home treats the inhabitant as a source of intentions. SoI is bidirectional, live, domestic, and begins with the body.

The implementation that follows exists to demonstrate one thing: what spatial responsiveness feels like. Everything else the concept requires — sensing a living plant, positioning in a real room, light engines with true color — is either simulated in the prototype or assumed of the near future.

Origin

I grew up spending summers and winters helping my grandparents with the plants on a rooftop in a small town. A place like that teaches you to read it. Dragonflies flying low signal a coming storm; the evening sky forecasts tomorrow; the color of a leaf reports on the soil. A small, enclosed space, dense with information for anyone who has learned to listen.

The city severed that. Skyscrapers replaced the sky, the environment stopped speaking, and the most a home offered in return was a voice command to a switch. The apartment knew nothing about itself or its inhabitants.

Canguilhem argues that every living thing constitutes its own milieu. SoI asks what a room would look like if those milieus were made visible to one another — a domestic interior that could speak the way that garden did.

The Tension

The first prototype was a window: a frosted, lensed frame with tree shadows rear-projected onto it, so that the room appeared to have trees outside. It succeeded on its own terms. People saw trees.

Why simulate? There are real relationships all around us, and the point of the piece is to connect us to the environment we are actually in.

A fabricated exterior was the inverse of the project. But the window produced the observation the rest of SoI is built on. The projection was deliberately blurred — a shadow cast from height — and it still read unmistakably as foliage. The meaning was carried by the motion, not the resolution. Resolution was a budget being spent on nothing.

So the image collapsed to one dimension, a single row of LEDs along a wall, and the freed budget went to color, which can carry meaning a picture cannot: warm for a person, green for a plant, browning for drought, a trail that fades faster on a dry day. Spatial fidelity traded for semantic range.

How it works

The prototype demonstrates the experience of spatial responsiveness with the hardware available in 2024. It is not the system; it is the argument for one.

sensors
  ultrasonic — one per relationship, not a grid:
    "someone near the wall", "someone near the plant"
  temperature + humidity — real, in the room
  sun position + weather — from the internet
      │
      ▼
lightfields — every inhabitant is an emitter
  human: a point source, leaves a trail
  plant: a slow pulse (scripted day/night, for now)
      │
      ▼
per-pixel accumulator — each LED sums every emitter
  by distance, every frame, and decays over time
      │
      ▼
lightscapes
  Horizon (walls)   Sky (ceiling)   Bubble (on the plant)

There is no positioning system. Each ultrasonic sensor answers a single question about a single adjacency — someone is near the wall, someone is near the plant — because the information that matters in a home is who is near what, not where everyone is on a grid.

The quality that made the system feel alive was forced by noise. Ultrasonic sensors misfire, and the first response was to filter the readings. The response that worked was to stop rendering readings altogether. Every pixel maintains an accumulator: each frame, every emitter in the room contributes according to its distance, and the total decays over time. A spurious reading adds a small amount and drains away before it is visible; a person standing in place keeps adding until the wall swells around them, and when they leave, it ebbs rather than cutting off. The light renders a history rather than a measurement. This is the difference from an occupancy sensor, which makes one binary decision at one instant: SoI’s light is a continuous function of every relationship in the room, carried forward in time.

Trail decay is a fixed fade multiplied by live temperature and humidity, on a response curve tuned by observation until the difference was perceptible. The hardware is an addressable LED strip in a diffusing channel, driven by a microcontroller.

Notes from Faye

It worked as an experience, and the experience was not the one an occupancy sensor gives. With two sensors, a plant that was only performing, and a strip with saturated color and modest output, entering the room still felt closer to a game or a film than to a domestic interior. Nothing switched on. The wall gathered light as I approached, held it while I stayed, and let it go after I left; the plant’s field and mine overlapped where we were near each other. The central claim held. Light that is continuous and relational reads as a presence in the room, where a triggered light reads as a fixture.

The solution to noise became the visual language. The ebb and swell was not designed; it emerged from handling a jittery sensor, and it is the strongest quality in the piece.

Next Steps

Sense a living plant. The Bubble pulsed on a scripted day/night rhythm as a stand-in for real activity. Reading the plant itself — its electrical signals, its response to touch and light — is the next substantive problem, and the one the concept most depends on.

Real light engines. Strips with accurate color and adequate output cost more than a thesis budget allowed; what was affordable was designed to look dramatic rather than true. The prototype demonstrates the relationship, not the rendering. The concept assumes engines that can render it faithfully, and they are arriving.

Legibility beyond the designer. The trail response is legible to me. It has not been shown legible to someone who does not know what to look for, and that gap — designer-visible versus inhabitant-visible — is the general problem beneath all of this. It needs inhabitants, and time.

From a miniature to a room. A full installation needs positioning across a real space and lighting that is addressable throughout — the infrastructure SoI anticipates rather than builds.

The system was tested by myself and my partner. One section of the Horizon survives. SoI is the origin of the work I have made since, and it is not finished.