Since 2019, Team IGNITE has designed or renewed a light installation every year, earning a spot on the light route of the GLOW Eindhoven each time. But if you now ask the student team what they are working on, GLOW only comes in seventh place.

Team manager Bram Elema first talks about the six projects currently underway (see box). Of those six, Pulse has the greatest potential, in his view, to make Eindhoven the world’s leading city for light once again. “In the previous century, all innovation around light came out of Eindhoven, but that hasn’t been the case for quite some time. We want to bring that back, and we’ve come up with something revolutionary.”

Flashing lights

Pulse is intended to become a lighting object that (national) governments can mount on existing streetlamps to help emergency vehicles move through traffic more quickly. Road users would see a warning before the ambulance, fire truck, or police car arrives nearby, giving them time to pull over. The team will initially focus on roads in Eindhoven but eventually wants to apply the concept outside built-up areas and on highways as well.

There are many different types of streetlamps along Dutch roads. The team has been in contact with OVLNL, a network that brings together designers and manufacturers of lighting installations.

“They give us free advice to help make the idea feasible, and we can go to them with all the challenges we encounter,” says Elema. An additional advantage is that an equivalent value of the advisory hours they receive is paid out as a financial subsidy by BOOST.

This academic year, student team IGNITE is working on six projects at the intersection of art and technology. Their final destinations will be both on and off the TU/e campus. IGNITE has fifty members, divided across the six projects.

1. In collaboration with the Austrian company Zumtobel, IGNITE is creating Tale. This installation is made from elongated lamps that were previously mounted horizontally on ceilings. The students are turning them into a vertical application, and the light artwork will be installed in Zumtobel’s Tilburg office.
2. Perception. This installation makes light perceptible through heat for people with visual impairments. The cylinder made of panels was created for GLOW Eindhoven 2025 and is now being transformed into a wall object. Team members are looking for a location in public space for Perception so that the public can enjoy it longer than just that week in November. “A city hall would be very suitable.”
3. IGNITE has already presented Vivid at three festivals in collaboration with Kultlab. Visitors to the Amsterdam Dance Event, Wilde Weide, and Wildeburg saw the metal tree. “We wanted to show that through industrialization everything transforms from nature into metal. It’s an extreme vision of the future that makes people reflect,” says the team manager. Vivid will be further developed this year.
4. Descending Heaven is a light ceiling that IGNITE created together with ASML for the music venue Effenaar. Twenty-four triangles can be individually controlled in height and light intensity. This year’s task: making it possible for the programming to be done by one person instead of two.
5. Bridge is the working title of the light installation that IGNITE wants to create on the viaduct over the A2 near the High Tech Campus Eindhoven. The old installation from 2007 has deteriorated, and the student team believes Eindhoven deserves a new lighting icon at that location.
6. Pulse. See above.

And yes, soon IGNITE will also start a subteam that will design an installation for GLOW Eindhoven 2026.

This article was translated using AI-assisted tools and reviewed by an editor.