You love the spectacle of fireworks but the loud bangs put your nervous system on edge. You like the magic of Halloween but not the fear. You like the Christmas light trails but it’s all a bit overwhelming with the herded, busy crowds and the bright flashing lights. If this describes you, then we are building this for you!
Imagine.
Using our design principles of maximising accessibility, we are building a calmer yet still magical alternative to these mainstream evening events. Imagine coherent and harmonic light and sound moving gently through historic trees, some of it literally paced to the rhythm of calm breathing. You step onto a pad and a low, warm tone answers your footstep, in tune with everything surrounding you. Your child holds their hand near a sensor which triggers colour and sound to ripple through the dark. Somebody you’ve never met steps on the next pad, and their note joins yours — in harmony. You are making something, together.
You stay as long as you like at each piece, move at your own pace, or sit and let the garden settle around you.
The seasonal evening out.
The big seasonal events — the fright nights, the firework displays, the Christmas and New Year light trails — are often overwhelming by design: loud, fast, over-stimulating, crowded, herded.
The people at the core of our designs are often sensitive to the sound of fireworks, to flashing, bright light, to the press of a trail at full capacity. For them, our installations could offer one of the only alternatives that are actually accessible and enjoyable and not just an endurance challenge.
Many other people will come and enjoy our evening installations out of a preference or a desire for a calmer and more considered approach, and that’s just as good a reason to be there.
How it’s built.
Each installation is made of a number of self-contained modules — some examples are interactive stepping stones, presence-detection systems that change sound and light elements when they recognise people in a space, tactile control stations, and soft, breathing-paced light and refraction optics — movements, rather than dazzlingly bright, flickering light. Each module runs on its own and each one is interactive, so nothing is passive and you are encouraged to be a co-creator of the experience.
The modules are tied together not by a central computer but by a single shared musical key and a coherent lighting palette, so everything you trigger stays in harmony with everything else in the installation. That makes the whole immersive environment an interwoven, coherent space.
Every installation includes at least one module designed for whoever has the least movement available — playable by presence or proximity alone — so that everyone can feel part of the experience.
The thinking behind every one of these choices — why nothing dominates, why there’s no wrong note, why the place stays the star — is set out in how we design the evening installations.
Arley AfterDark — the first full design.
Arley AfterDark is a concept created for Arley Arboretum, one of Britain’s oldest arboretums, here in Worcestershire.
It’s the Year 2 goal on our roadmap, and Year 1 comes first: building and testing the individual modules it will be assembled from, in the open, with the people they’re designed for. The concept exists so you can fully picture where the work is going, and so venues and funders can see the shape of what they’d be part of.
The installation sits inside the place, and the place remains itself — every module is fully removable, and the garden returns to exactly what it was.
For venues — a ticketed event of your own.
The commercial shape is different from our daytime work. The daytime outdoor sensory space sits inside a venue’s normal admission as an additional draw for an ordinary visit, and the evening installation is its own occasion — a separate, ticketed event, programmed for the seasons when people are looking for an evening out.
What it brings a venue is:
- ticket revenue and the footfall around it,
- an audience your competitors can’t reach, and
- a genuine accessibility credential you can cite in your own bids and reports.
We design for places that already hold a calm or contemplative atmosphere — heritage and private gardens, arboretums and parks, and even some indoor spaces like churches, cathedrals and historic buildings — and we respect those environments by revealing and complementing them rather than overriding or dominating them.
For festivals we create a quietened, calm space away from the main hustle and bustle. Someone hitting overwhelm in this scenario needs a space like this to escape to.
For schools, nurseries, respite and care settings: the daytime side of the work is yours — see Outdoor Sensory Spaces.