Fourteen projects from all over the globe and their design teams were awarded highest-level honors in the 2018 IES Illumination Awards program. Leading the way was the Love Sculpture at Sakura Lake Sports Park in China, which earned an IES Award of Distinction for Controls Innovation, sponsored by the Lighting Controls Association.
"Sixteen-hundred meters of RGB LED lights transform Sakura Lake's torus-shaped Love Sculpture into a circle of colors that can be manipulated by 12 nearby bicycles. At 42 meters high, the sculpture generates 12 lines of light around its circumference–one for each bicycle connected to the lighting platform. Each bike can affect the speed of light via three different modes: cooperative mode, single competitive mode and group competitive mode. In cooperative move, the overall speed of all of the bikes controls the animation of the lights–the faster people ride, the quicker the lights move around the sculpture. When the riders reach the highest level of speed, the light shows its full range of colors for 10 seconds before returning to its starting state. In single competitive mode, each bike controls one band of light with a specific color. The faster the rider, the faster the band of light moves around circle. The first rider to achieve the highest speed wins, causing each band of light to change to the winner's color. Group competitive mode consists of dividing the bikes into two teams of six. One group's light moves clockwise while the other's moves counterclockwise. Once the two sets of light meet, the sculpture will display the color of the fastest group."
