Using Coloured Lights in Physical and Immersive VR Environments as Material for Design

This project explores coloured light as a material for design in fashion and textile practice, challenging its conventional role as a passive tool for illumination or visual enhancement. While light in fashion and textile design is commonly addressed through daylight conditions or integrated light-emitting technologies, the research in this project proposes coloured light itself as an active, generative design material capable of shaping form, surface, and perception across both physical and immersive virtual environments.

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Through a series of controlled experiments, the project examined interactions between coloured surfaces and coloured light in physical space and in immersive virtual reality using three-dimensional sketching tools. These explorations revealed how subtractive colour interactions produce shifts in hue, saturation, visibility, and greying, and how smooth transitions between coloured light and surface can generate dynamic surface patterns. In both environments, coloured light was shown to transform static surfaces into temporal expressions, introducing movement, emergence, and disappearance as design variables.

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To critically reflect on these findings, a five-day workshop was conducted with undergraduate fashion and textile design students. By working experimentally with coloured light in both physical and virtual contexts, participants developed an embodied understanding of light as a material rather than a secondary design parameter. The resulting design works demonstrated how coloured light could be used to orchestrate dynamic patterns, spatial depth, and narrative progression, particularly when surface motifs were designed to interact rather than remain visually fixed.

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The research further highlights immersive virtual reality as a particularly fertile design space, offering expanded control over light intensity, material behaviour, and colour responsiveness beyond what is achievable in physical environments. This capacity enabled the selective visibility of surfaces, variable colour behaviours, and layered interactions between materials with different light sensitivities.

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Authors: Marjan Kooroshnia, Jan Tepe

The petal pattern was designed by Luna Gil