As a continuation of her interest in architecture, Sherouk dedicated her masters study in the exploration of daylight as an asset to generate architectural design in Egypt. Her studies evaluated the lighting distribution and contrast ratios as design tools for architecture.
“Light memories” are visual episodic memories of a lighting composition that transcended an emotional response. The study considers the memories and how they could be a way to integrate users in the design process. Both designs and memories are considered two subjective elements, for both designers and users. The purpose of the thesis is to firstly test if there are common light memories for users that share the same specifics of the culture associated to the availability of daylight and secondly to explore the possibility of creating a design method to incorporate this light memory as a design tool, to recreate the similar
emotional response of the memory in a newly designed setting.
Two street typologies in Egypt were chosen to be the visual memories to be assessed. A personal daylight analysis was conducted to understand the designer’s perspective. And a virtual reality experiment was conducted along with descriptive questionnaire to understand the emotional response of users to these streets. A comparison of the designer and users results helped in the creation of a scheme for design. The proposed method suggests the usage of perceptual tools such as the light distribution and contrast ratios and proposes the analysis of the memory in terms of scales. The method is applied in the creation of two experiential models that abstract the essence of the light memories and puts them into question for subjects to evaluate. The emotional response of users is recorded to evaluate the method application.
Based on the tests it was found that the existing of a common memory is possible. The evaluation of the specific street memory through the experiential model results show that a high percentage among the users sharing the same daylight culture recognized the streets. Although most users had the same emotional responses to the models, but the agreement on the emotional percentage amongst them was lower than the recognition results. This indicates that the memory could be integrated into the design process but wouldn’t necessarily have the same emotional impact on users. Having a strict design methodology is difficult to implement yet could be an eye opener for ways to use the light memories.
