2055, lighting design:
a white paper to reimagine urban nightscapes
Urban lighting professionals can now delve into a compelling new forward-looking resource from France’s Association des Concepteurs Lumière et Éclairagistes (ACE – Lighting designers and engineers’ association): the bilingual white paper “2055, lighting design”, published in November 2025 for the association’s 30th anniversary.
This publication explores how lighting design might evolve and invites cities and professionals worldwide to imagine their future nocturnal landscapes.
Exploring probable nocturnal futures
“2055, lighting design” positions itself as a realistic yet ideal exploration of how the profession could change between now and 2055, sixty years after ACE’s creation. The foreword revisits the emergence of light urbanism and lighting master plans in the late 1980s and 1990s, then fast-forwards to current concerns such as light pollution, biodiversity, energy sobriety and inclusive night-time policies.
The white paper is the result of a Think Tank created in April 2024 at the instigation of Roger Narboni, gathering nine ACE lighting designers to carry out conceptual monitoring on future shifts in urban and interior lighting, both by day and by night. Working with time horizons of 5, 10, 20 and 30 years, the group used scenarios to extrapolate “probable nocturnal futures”. These scenarios were used to identify how the profession should evolve in response to environmental, social, technological and urban transformations.
Key themes for cities and lighting designers
Seven core themes structure the publication: darkness, urban change and new night-time mobilities, renovation and ecodesign, rurality, health and wellbeing, interior and residential lighting, and artificial intelligence.
- Darkness: The book argues that the future lighting designer will also be a “night-time designer”, rebalancing light and dark in cities and integrating dark infrastructures into planning and regulation. It presents darkness as a shared heritage and a resource for well-being, calling for education programmes that help citizens re-learn how to appreciate the night.
- Urban change and mobility: Anticipating more intense and diversified night-time activities, the texts explore how lighting strategies can support new forms of mobility, changing rhythms of public space use and more continuous 24‑hour cities, while still reducing over-illumination.
- Renovation, ecodesign and rural night: The white paper discusses frugal revitalisation of existing urban and rural environments, highlighting how lighting master plans and rural dark-sky approaches can reconcile safety, local uses and biodiversity protection.
- Health and wellbeing: One chapter focuses on the “lighting designer of care”, linking interior and exterior lighting design to circadian rhythms, visual comfort, mental health and quality of life, and emphasising the importance of integrating scientific knowledge on light and health into everyday projects.
- Artificial intelligence: ACE’s Think Tank examines AI both as a potential “new lighting designer” and as a tool, reflecting on creative opportunities, the risk of standardisation, and the need to keep human perception, cultural specificity and ethical considerations at the centre of design.
Voices and imaginaries
“2055, lighting design” is enriched by two interviews: one with British lighting designer Mark Major of Speirs Major Light Architecture, who shares his long-term perspective on specialisation, global practice and future skills; and one with Dr Christophe Martinsons, a specialist in the effects of light on health and well-being. Their contributions open an international dialogue on how regulations, education and practice might adapt to new expectations in different cultural and climatic contexts.
The white paper also includes a portfolio of 17 projects submitted for the ACE 2025 Imagination Award, inviting designers to speculate freely about lighting in 2055.
A resource for the LUCI network
Available as a freely shareable bilingual PDF, “2055, lighting design” is intended to nourish collective thinking about the future of urban and architectural lighting, in France and internationally.
By sharing this white paper, ACE invites municipalities, designers, researchers and citizens to collectively imagine resilient, diverse and more environmentally responsible nocturnal futures—and to place lighting design at the heart of forthcoming urban transitions.
