Daan Roosegaarde, light and future protopia
In an age measured by data streams and technological promises, another way of imagining tomorrow still exists. It does not begin with projections or forecasts. It begins with a simpler, more radical question: what remains invisible to the human eye, and how can we make it readable, shared, almost physical?
This question has guided the work of Daan Roosegaarde for nearly twenty years. Artist, designer and, more recently, film director, the Dutch creator born in 1979 in Nieuwkoop has shaped Studio Roosegaarde in Rotterdam into what he calls a social design lab. A place where technology and nature do not compete but converse through one precise language: light.
Roosegaarde does not speak of utopia. He prefers a more grounded term, protopia: a prototype world improved step by step. Beauty, for him, is never decoration. In Dutch the word schoonheid carries a double meaning, beauty and cleanliness. Clean air, clean energy, clean space thus become the new values of a design that does not merely represent the future but makes it experiential.
His education in fine arts, followed by a master’s in architecture at the Berlage Institute, and an early fascination with fireflies and bioluminescent jellyfish, produced a coherent path. From the interactive installations of the early 2000s, such as Dune and Intimacy, to works that have crossed museums and cities worldwide: the Smog Free Project, the Van Gogh Path, Waterlicht, Spark. Each piece attempts to translate complex phenomena (pollution, rising seas, wind energy, biodiversity) into experiences the public can walk through with both body and gaze.
Among the many directions of his practice, three recent projects show this method with particular clarity.
Windlicht connects the blades of wind turbines with beams of LED light. Specially developed software and tracking technology detect the blades rotating at 280 kilometres per hour and turn them into dancing lines across the night sky. Wind energy, often perceived as distant infrastructure, becomes spectacle and invitation to look.
Urban Sun uses calibrated far-UVC light to reduce airborne viruses in public space. Born from research that began before the pandemic and later became a symbol of possibility during the health emergency, the project never claims to be a complete solution. Roosegaarde presents it as a tool of awareness: a circle of light that makes biological invisibility legible and, at the same time, an occasion to gather again.
Glowing Garden, presented in 2025, shifts the gaze once more. Hundreds of orchids and other carefully selected flowers, grown with plant biologists and without genetic modification, are illuminated with wavelengths that reveal how butterflies, bees and other insects perceive the world. At night the garden becomes a luminous landscape. The invisible (the ultraviolet spectrum humans cannot see) turns into a collective experience.
These works are not isolated. They belong to a wider practice that includes the return of fireflies to Bali, the film Return of the Fireflies (already awarded at several international festivals), the biodegradable spark clouds of Spark, and ongoing reflections on design as a living system. Roosegaarde has received recognition from the London Design Festival to the INDEX Award, exhibited in institutions such as the Stedelijk, Tate Modern and the Design Museum in London, and serves as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.
The interpretive knot of his trajectory remains open. When the works are measured solely as technological devices, they reveal limits. When they are read as imaginative devices (exactly as he intends them) they hold more firmly. They do not promise to solve planetary problems alone. They propose instead another posture: to use beauty as a strategy that makes change desirable and understandable.
At a moment when design, energy, health and environment seek new languages to narrate ongoing transformation, Roosegaarde’s work offers a concrete example. Not of prophecy, but of operational protopia. A way of building landscapes of the future that do not remain abstract, but can be crossed, photographed, discussed.
Light, for him, remains the primary medium. Not metaphor, but instrument. And nature, as he has said recently, continues to be the greatest designer.
