Glowwalk Design Project

Glowwalk is an interactive light-and-plant curtain for the business district of Kirchberg. It is designed to make everyday walks to and from the office more playful and to carve out a small living patch and ecological corridor for glowworms, fireflies, and other insects in an otherwise hard, glass-and-concrete landscape.

A dense grid of strings hangs like a vertical veil along the sidewalk in front of a planted strip. Each string carries diffused LEDs and a tiny sensor, so the curtain reacts to the slightest touch or movement. In its resting state, light behaviour stays close to the planter line: scattered, gentle flickers clustered around the foliage, echoing insects sitting low in the grass and undergrowth.

When someone walks past, waves a hand, or brushes through the strings, the pattern shifts. The interaction reads as a gust of wind or a body moving through the bushes: points of light “wake up” from the base and rise through the curtain, as if a cloud of fireflies is lifting off from the plants. The motion then slowly sinks back to a calm, ground-level shimmer, ready for the next commuter. Over a winter evening, hundreds of people briefly awaken these digital fireflies as they pass, turning a standard corporate sidewalk into a short, shared moment.

Fireflies and glowworms need dark nights to communicate, rough vegetation to climb and hide in, moist, sheltered ground where they and their prey can live, and spaces that are left pesticide-free. The installation is designed to respond to all of these: its light levels stay low and warm, planting is allowed to grow into a small, layered mini-meadow with shade and damp pockets, and maintenance practices are chosen to let invertebrates and their habitat persist rather than be tidied away. A QR code on the structure links to an information website on glowworms in Luxembourg, so commuters who pause to play with the lights can also learn what these animals need and how this small strip is trying to make room for them.

For commuters, Glowwalk offers a brief, playful interruption on a dark walk. At the same time, by tying the light behaviour to the image of fireflies rising from the bushes, it makes room in the business district for a small pocket of flickering, non-human life.

Collaborative Project between:

Juliane Morel
Illustrations, Mockups, Ideation

Shivani Chakrachhattri
Playfulness integration, Ideation

Louis Goniva
Prototype construction (welding, soldering, metal bending, animation programming), Ideation

with the support of:

inProgress