I'm currently reading Webb Keanes' Animals, Robots, Gods. In one section, he tells of a Pastor reflecting on the moment he first commanded Amazon Alexa to switch on his lights.

“Until now, only God could do that".

The phrase, “Let there be light,” once reserved for divine fiat, now uttered casually to a voice assistant becomes a site of moral ambiguity. In that instant, the pastor confronts a subtle but profound shift: the authority to summon light has moved from the sacred to the synthetic, from the ineffable to the programmable.

Religion aside, this anecdote, while brief, opens a door into a deeper philosophical terrain that resonates strongly with my own experience. As a lighting designer who has spent over two decades shaping how spaces glow, dim, and respond, I’ve often found myself asking: how much control is too much? Lighting is not merely technical. It is narrative, atmospheric, and increasingly, a battleground for agency.

In architectural lighting design, the question of control is not incidental. It is foundational. Should clients have full access to every dimmer, every scene, every override? Or should designers restrict interaction to preserve the integrity of a carefully curated experience? These decisions are rarely neutral. They shape how people inhabit space, how they feel, and how they behave.

Too much control invites entropy. Carefully tuned scenes get overwritten, moods diluted, intentions lost in a haze of well-meaning tinkering. A lobby designed to evoke calm becomes harshly lit at 9 a.m. because someone prefers brightness with their coffee. A gallery’s subtle interplay of shadow and highlight is flattened by a technician who “just wanted to see better.”

Yet too little control breeds frustration. Guests in hotel rooms encounter cryptic interfaces: touch panels with unlabelled buttons, automated scenes that defy intuition. The illusion of choice becomes a puzzle box. The room resists them. And in resisting, it reveals something deeper; the tension between design intent and user autonomy.

This tension is not just logistical. It is moral. Lighting systems, like thermostats, radios, and even coffee machines, become proxies for power. Who gets to decide what “comfortable” feels like? Whose preferences shape the shared environment? In offices, squabbles over the air conditioning or the radio station reveal deeper hierarchies. In public spaces, lighting becomes a language of inclusion or exclusion: bright for safety, dim for intimacy, harsh for deterrence.

Keane’s thesis, that moral imagination is shaped by our interactions with nonhumans, feels especially resonant here. Lighting systems are nonhuman actors. They respond, they adapt, they sometimes resist. And in doing so, they shape our ethical landscape. To command light is to assert a kind of sovereignty. To relinquish control is to trust. And trust, in design, is rarely simple.

If lighting systems are proxies for power, then smart home technology is their increasingly senile cousin. The promise of seamless automation such as voice-activated lights, climate control, and ambient music once felt like a leap toward intuitive living. But lately, it feels more like a stumble. Devices like Google Home, once hailed as intelligent assistants, now seem to be showing their age.

My daughter often ends up shouting at the speaker in frustration, her tone shifting from polite request to exasperated command.

The irony is thick: a device designed to respond to natural language now requires unnatural patience. What was meant to simplify has become a source of friction. And in that friction, we see the limits of automation... not just technical, but emotional.

Smart tech promised empowerment, but often delivers dependency. We design our homes around its quirks, adjust our speech to its limitations, and tolerate its forgetfulness. The moral imagination Keane describes is at play here too. These devices are nonhuman actors, but they’re not neutral. They shape our behaviour, our expectations, even our moods. And when they fail, they don’t just frustrate. They erode trust.

So what is the answer? In practice, I feel we should embrace ambiguity. Design systems that offer guided flexibility: interfaces that invite interaction but discourage chaos. Build in pre-sets that reflect the architectural intent, but allow for subtle personalization. Advocate for education, teaching users not just how to control light, but how to understand it.

Lighting design is not just about brightness or colour temperature. It is about crafting relationships: between people and their environments, between intention and experience, between control and surrender. It is about designing systems that do not just illuminate, but provoke reflection.

And maybe, just maybe, it is about reimagining what it means to say, “Let there be light.”

Dan | BloqDigital is a lighting designer and digital artist based in the UK, who writes about Art, Technology, Web3 and Culture.

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