Dean Skira: How one designer is revolutionising street lighting

What if the problem with street lighting is not the fixture, but the whole way we design it?

In this conversation on Light Talk, Martin Klaasen sits down with Croatian lighting designer and developer Dean Skira, the creator of Taman. Dean traces his path from early work in New York to public projects in Pula, including the city’s celebrated lit cranes and its first light festival.

Dean explains how Taman flips the workflow from product-first to requirement-first. It starts from a simple Google Earth snapshot and hand-drawn layers, calculates the whole urban environment rather than just the space between two poles, positions the fittings, optimises photometric curves and compares market-ready products with the ideal result. He also talks about the role of machine learning in the software, and a real project where the luminous flux came down by 45.8%.

The conversation then turns to the bigger picture: outdated manufacturing, political decision-making, copycat products, master planning for whole districts and cities, and why the future may belong to modular, mass-customised luminaires.

Is the right amount of darkness the point? Let’s discuss!

#LightingDesign #StreetLighting #UrbanLighting #LightPollution #DarkSky #Taman #LightTalk

Listen to full episode :