Every year, the LIT Lighting Design Awards assemble a kind of global chorus, artists, architects, scientists, activists, and students whose work suggests that light is far more than a design element. It is a language, a memory palace, a way of building meaning out of both presence and absence. Yet 2025 felt different from the usual celebration. The projects were more contemplative, more attuned to the fault lines of our time. They seemed to understand that the world is straining under the weight of overlapping crises, and that light, ever adaptable, must stretch to meet this moment.
Editor’s Note:
At Designooor, we approach design as a form of cultural inquiry, an active conversation between craft, ethics, and imagination. What struck me most about this year’s LIT winners is how confidently they navigate the emotional terrain of our time. These projects don’t chase trend or spectacle; they stay rooted in lived experience. They listen before they illuminate. And that, I believe, is where the future of lighting design resides: in the ability to respond to the world with clarity, conscience, and purpose.
– Editor-in-Chief
Lighting Design/Product Company Atiaîa Lighting Design
Lead Designers Mariana Novaes
Other Designer’s names Lighting Design Assistant: Pedro Ferreira. Interns: Bárbara Oliveira, Elisa Campos
Architecture Company Gustavo Penna Arquiteto e Associados
Interior Design Company Gustavo Penna Arquiteto e Associados
Other Credits Landscape: Medra Paisagismo; Signage: Greco; Project Management: Olhar 360 Projetos e Gerenciamento
Project Location Córrego do Feijão, Brumadinho – Minas Gerais, Brazil
Nowhere was that tension more palpable than in the year’s Architectural Lighting Design of the Year, Memorial Brumadinho by Atiaîa Lighting Design. The team, led by Mariana Novaes, carried the gravity of the 2019 dam collapse in Minas Gerais like an unspoken responsibility. Their lighting strategy does not dramatize the tragedy; it witnesses it. Pathways recede into darkness, water glints only where reflection feels earned, and vegetation becomes a screen for shadows that move with the visitor. The result is not a monument, but a slow unburdening. You walk through it and feel the strange, dissonant comfort of being guided while grieving.
The memorial understands something essential: light is not neutral. It can soothe or unsettle, remember or erase. Here, it chooses to remember, and refuses to blink.
Lighting Design/Product Company Studio Jt Pty Ltd
Lead Designers James Tapscott
Other Credits Project Curation by Jane Lee, Project management by The Ton
Project Location Seoul, Sth Korea
Half a world away in Seoul, the Entertainment Lighting Design of the Year, Arc ZERO: Eclipse, turns the act of seeing into an experience of uncertainty. Artist James Tapscott and Studio JT crafted an eight-meter stainless-steel ring that appears suspended without effort. But the installation’s true form emerges only through light and mist, both unpredictable, both obedient to the invisible movements of air. If the Brumadinho memorial is grounded in grief, Arc ZERO is a meditation on impermanence, on how the boundaries of an object can dissolve into atmosphere. In a city where digital spectacle is common currency, this installation opts for restraint. It asks for patience, for presence, for a kind of looking that has become rare in crowded public spaces.
Lighting Design/Product Company One to One By Martin Döller
Lead Designers Martin Döller
Other Designer’s names Jon Peer Bouwer
Other Credits Interior Design: ARRCC
Project Location Buenos Aires, Argentina
The product design category approached light from another angle, material longevity. Martin Döller’s Amphora chandelier is unmistakably contemporary, yet it feels anchored in an older tradition of craftsmanship. Cast in solid bronze, each component carries the weight of something that refuses to be disposable. The patina, the modularity, the selective direction of light, they all point back to the same conviction: that objects with emotional resonance age differently. They settle into their environments the way a familiar scent settles into a room.
University / School Name Deggendorf Institute of Technology (DIT), Faculty Electrical Engineering and Media Technology
Lead Designers Burak Bardakci, Miriam Haidn, Nico Karl, Jannick Lippert, Franziska Rieder, Sara Salamun, Jesse Voigt, Malik Yalniz
Professor Names Prof. Sabine Wiesend
Other Credits HFT Stuttgart Interior Architecture Prof. Ziegler, University of Stuttgart IBK2 Prof. Ostermann
Project Location Salone Verde Art & Social Club, Calle Regina 2258, 30135 Venezia VE, Italy
Meanwhile, the student projects, typically where experimentation thrives, carried an unexpectedly urgent ecological tone this year. The Deggendorf Institute of Technology’s Flight into Shadow looks deceptively simple at first: patterns of dappled light inspired by leaves. But the subtlety masks a sharp commentary. In a warming world, shade is no longer a luxury; it is an act of resistance. The team’s installation reframes natural shading as an architectural system, blurring the line between infrastructure and daydream.
University Artcenter College of Design
Lead Designers Yuxin Luo
Professor Names Penny Herscovitch
Material reckoning reappears in CinderGlow, where designer Yuxin Luo transforms remnants of wildfire-scorched wood into pendant lights that glow softly, almost protectively. There is nothing sentimental about it; the work is too grounded in the realities of California’s fire seasons. But there is hope inside the object, an insistence that ruin can be reimagined without being denied.
This year’s Spotlight Prize widened the scope even further, turning attention toward humanitarian lighting. GreenLamp, a Swiss nonprofit working in rural Ethiopia, has spent over a decade bringing solar-powered solutions to regions where childbirth often unfolds in darkness. Their work is practical and lifesaving, but also deeply symbolic. Light becomes a marker of dignity, something every mother, every midwife, every clinic deserves. The recognition is not simply a celebration of what they’ve achieved, but an acknowledgement that lighting design has a responsibility that extends far beyond architectural aesthetics.
At the peak of the 2025 awards stands Suzan Tillotson, recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award. Tillotson’s work, spanning cultural landmarks from The Broad in Los Angeles to The Shed in New York, has always embodied a distinctive kind of discipline. She works in the space between confidence and humility, the place where lighting reveals rather than overwhelms. Her contribution to the field is not defined by signature gestures but by a sensibility: light should carry intention, not ego.
And surrounding all these honorees is a jury whose breadth reflects lighting design’s increasingly interdisciplinary identity. Architects, theorists, performers, publishers, and educators approached each entry not as isolated objects, but as expressions of cultural and environmental context. Their presence reinforces a truth the LIT Awards have been circling for years: lighting design is no longer a niche practice, it’s a worldview.
The 2025 winners come from 62 countries. Their projects span devastation and renewal, spectacle and subtlety, invention and remembrance. Yet what unites them is a shared belief that light is never merely functional. It is narrative. It is gesture. It is possibility.
As the world becomes more complicated, light becomes more necessary, less as a tool, more as an invitation to see differently.
