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NORDIC LIGHT & COLOUR
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er interaction between participants with different knowledge
background. Another way of saying this is that there should
have been fewer specified assignments and more freedom for
participants to use the unique laboratories according to their
own creative ideas.
FINAL ESSAYS
The last part of the course was to write an essay, discussing a
topic relevant for the person’s own thesis work from the joint
perspective of colour and light. This task was optional and not
all participants wrote essays. The essays came to cover a wide
variety of research questions such as a full scale study on the
use of virtual environments to study daylight and colour, a
survey on how the colour rendering properties of light sources
have been presented to customers and an interview investiga-
tion on professionals’ thoughts about light and colour in nurs-
ing home facilities. Some of the essays were offered publica-
tion in this peer reviewed publication together with articles by
some of the lecturers.
The essay work was meant to take 3 weeks full time work, cor-
responding to 4,5 ECTS. After some participants have finished
their essays and others have choosen not to write, we can
conclude that the allotted time was too short to lead to essays
of the expected depth and quality. Those who successfully fin-
ished their essay work have, probably, spent much more time
on this than three weeks. This means that in a future course,
the essay assignment has to be either reformulated or given
more time and credits.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
One important aim with the course was to contribute to the
formation of
Colour and light
as a coherent field of knowledge.
We can conclude that the interdisciplinary approach and the di-
verse backgrounds of participants and lecturers have favoured
an interaction between fields of expertise and, more concretely,
between people. All participants now have a broader under-
standing of issues concerning colour and light, and they have
also got an interdisciplinary network for future work and col-
laboration.
When looking at the concrete realization of the course, we can
conclude that it included too much of scheduled work and too
few opportunities for the participants to share and discuss
each other’s work. Also, more time should have been allot-
ted to free interaction in workshops, thus making better use
of the available laboratories. At the same time, all themes
were considered valuable by the participants, and the course
would loose some of its interdisciplinary character if some of
its themes were excluded. Thus we have an equation that will
be difficult to solve without extending the course time. All this
will be considered in the planning of the next course, which we
hope to give in 2014.