The functionalist paradigm has given us good visual performance, and a great understanding of visual discomfort, while recent contributions in the field of natural sciences have given us a greater understanding of the health issues, especially regarding circadian lighting. Both perspectives are quantifiable and therefore can be used in design criteria, giving a measurable economic argument for implementing certain features in lighting design products. Is that all there is to creating good lighting in your residency?
These features can at its best leave the resident indifferent, but they do not take into account the subjective human’s emotional, cultural and social relation to lighting. Even though these can be found in some sparse qualitative studies on residential lighting, the difficulty in measuring them can make it hard to get on the agenda of design criteria.
An evaluation of what values design criteria rests upon today, and its historical traces, makes it possible for this study to reevaluate, and through transdisciplinary inquiry with the involved communities of practice, propose new values and visions as basis for future residential lighting.
This thesis proposes that residential lighting design criteria should be co-shaped through pragmatic design games by the involved communities of practice. These games should be based on values of the known functional and health perspectives but also through inclusion of the resident as an active part of lighting, which shapes the atmosphere with the help of light, guided by emotion and their social and cultural perspectives.

This is an effort to reevaluate the underlying values of design criterias.
But it is just as much an effort in creating the process through which it can happen, and how design criteria can be co-shaped from these. A process where the involved communities of practice can see through their localized, embedded and invested knowledge and find pragmatic application of each other’s specific knowledge, and thereby co-shape a better value base for residential lighting design and a visionary direction for residential lighting design criteria.