Lights in Alingsås has its first online concept meeting

From 26 to 29 March, this year’s designers should have been here in Alingsås in Sweden for a concept meeting to start the planning for the annual Lights in Alingsås.
During the concept meeting, designers usually hear about the year’s theme, visit the places they will illuminate in the autumn and start planning what they are going to do. Then in September they return and, together with the students from the lighting workshops, they create their installations.

This year things were a little different and the concept meeting was held entirely online. This was due to the current pandemic involving the corona virus - covid 19.

“Four of us in the project group were already in Alingsås, but many of our colleagues joined us online, as did this year’s seven lighting designers from their homes in Europe and the US. Cancelling the meeting wasn’t an option as there are many decisions to be taken at this time of year if we want to run Lights in Alingsås in the autumn,” says Event Manager Camilla Boström.

Before the meeting the light trail was filmed and the film sent to this year’s designers in good time, so that they could prepare for the meeting as best they could. Of the ten sites, they got to choose their first, second and third favourite places, and after a short discussion everyone was in agreement.

“The meeting was better than expected! This is the first time we’ve had an online meeting like this and it was exciting to meet everyone,” says Workshop Manager Margaretha Stenmark.

This year´s workshop heads

Sara Ortega, Spain
Sara Ortega is an Architect, Lighting Designer, Technology teacher and Researcher.
When Sara doesn´t do research she works as Senior Lighting Designers at Ledscontrol, in Barcelona with design, management, programming, mounting and installing.
As a senior Lighting Designers, Sara has worked with big projects as the Zouk Club in Kuala Lumpur, the Manacar Tower in Mexico and the DWP18 in Bali.

Luciana Alanis, Switzerland
With over 16 years of dedication to light, Luciana founded her own lighting design consultancy in 2019, called Lichtgold gmbh, based in St. Gallen. In her daily business, she works on diverse interior and exterior, public and private lighting projects.
Luciana has experience from previous workshops. She was the workshop head for Lights in Blokzijl, Netherlands, November 2019.

Jessica Krometis, USA
Jessica Krometis is the Associate Designer for the lighting firm CM Kling+Associates in Washington.
Before joining the architectural lighting field, she spent 10 years in Chicago and New York working as Lighting Designer for regional and storefront theaters, museum exhibits and special events.
Jessica wants to create Lights Art that leaves the viewers breathless together with this year´s designers and students.

Anuj Gala, Finland and Rogier Hengeveld, The Netherlands (The only team this year)
Anuj Gala works as a Senior lighting designer at Lighting Design Collective in Finland, where he has been working with many permanent Light Art and public space projects such as UNESCO Heritage Tallinn, Kruunuvuorenranta Light Art, Tieto HQ, Fortum HQ and Helsinki Outlet to name a few. His lighting design journey started in Goa, and went later on to Berlin and New York.
Rogier Hengeveld has over 10 yeras of experience as international project manager, and has guided multiple intrernational project installatons over the years. He has his own company Lighting Business Consultancy. Rogier has been part of Lights in Alingsås many times when he worked for Osram.
Working together as a team, Anuj and Rogier believes they have the perfect blend of knowledge in interactive lighting technology, lighting project experience and lighting design

Rodrigo Muro, Sweden
Rodrigo has over 20 years of experience with lighting.
In 2011 he started to work as the Program Director at KTH (Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan) where he teaches year 4 and 5 Master in Architecture students and course responsible and examiner at Architectural Lighting Design Master Course. He works also as Lighting Designer for Light Bureau (former ÅF Lighting) with outdoor lighting design projects and product development.

Craig Spring, USA
Craig Spring is the Principal at Luminosity – Architectural Lighting Design in Colorado where he works with civic, culture, music, residential architectural lighting. He has been involved in many project in Seattle, USA and Sydney, Australia. One of them is Sydney Opera House.
To help advance the lighting profession regionally, he is one of the current IALD Regional Coordinators for the Rocky Mountain region, since 2013.
He was selected for 40under40 North America and 40under40 Global from the magazine Lighting Magazine 2018.

This year´s edition of Lights in Alingsås opens September 25 and runs to November 1. The participating students and the designers arrives in the middle of September and the workshop takes place September 19-26.