(UK) – mondo*arc and darc magazines, in collaboration with Light Collective, launched their new international lighting design awards at their darc night event in London on February 5th.

darc night, the launch party for the darc awards, took place on February 5th at Dilston Grove in Southwark Park, Bermondsey, London and featured a special lighting scheme by Light Collective using fittings from the darc awards commercial partners.  A Dark Source animation and exhibition by Kerem Asfuroglu of Speirs + Major also featured. Over 150 designers and partners attended the event.

Paul James, awards director and publishing editor of mondo*arc and darc, gave a presentation explaining the awards programme and darc night concept.

“With our database of over 1,000 international lighting design practices, as well as interior designers and architects, there is a unique opportunity for every practice to get involved in the awards process,” commented James. “We intend to make the darc awards the most accessible and global awards programme ever. After the shortlists have been chosen by an expert panel of international lighting designers, each of the 1,000+ lighting design practices and their designers will be invited to vote on their favourite projects via our specially developed website. Using the model developed by the Oscars where all members vote on the work of their peers, the darc awards will give every designer a vote, making this the only truly peer-to-peer lighting design awards in the world.”

Each award will be split into low and high budgets, thus allowing the smaller projects a chance to compete and not just given a token ‘Special Projects’ award.

Martin Lupton and Sharon Stammers of Light Collective are excited by the prospect of a pluralistic awards event: “Having been involved in many lighting awards programs over many years, this is a great opportunity to build on all of those experiences and try to create a different version of celebrating the best of lighting design where the judging is in the hands of everybody. Helping to shape darc night in collaboration with mondo*arc and darc has given us a chance to create an awards ceremony that is by the people, for the people – it’s the Oscars of lighting design!”

All the projects and the companies who have submitted them will be present on the website so that, over time, www.darcawards.com will become a comprehensive online lighting design resource that can be used by designers and clients alike for inspiration.

There will also be product categories (two architectural and one decorative) that will follow the same philosophy resulting in a comprehensive online database of products.

Following the voting process the awards ceremony will take place as part of darc night in September 2015. This will be an atmospheric party in a unique venue in London. Imagine light art, street food, lighting installations… this breaks all the awards rules and will be unlike any other awards ceremony to date.

Each commercial partner will be able to show off the capabilities of their product via a series of light installations from collaborations with lighting designers.

Currently the manufacturer partners consist of Lucent, Megaman, Innermost, LSE Lighting, KKDC, Concord, L&L Luce&Light and Reggiani. A maximum of twelve partners will be involved in order to create a dozen inspiration spaces at the specially selected venue in London next September.

darc night will be part of the IYL2015 (International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies 2015 ) related activities program and will be promoted by the L-RO (Lighting-Related Organizations) to raise awareness for the lighting design profession and showcase the importance and beauty of light.

www.darcawards.com