Book excerpt: This book advocates an approach to lighting design that focuses on how people experience illumination. Lighting Design in Shared Public Spaces contextualizes light, dark and lighting design within the settings, sensations, ideas and imaginaries that form our understandings of ourselves and the world around us. The chapters in this collection bring a new perspective to lighting design, arguing for an approach that addresses how lighting is experienced, understood and valued by people. Across a range of new case studies from Australia, Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, the authors account for lighting design's crucial role in shaping our dynamic and messy experiential worlds. With many turning to innovative ethnographic methodologies, they powerfully demonstrate how feelings of comfort, safety, security, vulnerability, care and wellbeing can configure in and through how people experience and manipulate light and dark. By focusing on how lighting is improvised, arranged, avoided and composed in relation to the people and things it acts upon, the book advances understandings of lighting design by showing how improved experiences of the built environment can result from more sensitive and context-specific illumination. The book is intended for social scientists who are interested in the lit or sensory world, as well as designers, architects, urban planners and others concerned with how the experience of light, dark and lighting might be both better understood and implemented in our shared public spaces.