Federico Favero

I work at KTH Lighting Design Lab, a Division at KTH Architecture, since 2006, first as Assistant Teacher, then Lecturer and Examiner. I have been Head of the Lighting Design Unit from 2014 to 2015 and Programme Director of the Master in Architectural Lighting Design from 2014 to 2019. In my time as Head of Unit and Programme Director I led a team of five teachers and researchers and a cohort of external collaborators. We established new courses in lighting at KTH School of Architecture and I led the process to gather academic and financial support to establish the first professorship in Lighting Design in Sweden.

I am involved in the St.Eriks Eye Hospital Post Occupancy Evaluation (2024–26); and PLEXE project (2024–26), in collaboration with KTH Live-In Lab.

I defended my PhD entitled "Light Rhythms" in April 2024. The project has been supported by Svensson Stiftelse and hosted at KTH EECS, Division of Media Technology and Interaction Design - MID, under the supervision of Prof. Roberto Bresin, and co-supervised by Ass. Professors Ute Besenecker and Arne Lowden, SU. My research interest lies in the question: how do people feel and behave in an illuminated space? This question includes the effect of light in architecture and its impact on human perception, affect, motion and ultimately well-being. I study these responses using a multidisciplinary approach, merging qualitative and quantitative methods from psychology and behavioural studies, and I use an integrative lighting design approach that combines artificial lighting and daylight in architecture and the built environment, indoors and outdoors. Here is my latest published paper in LEUKOS on the topic Light and Motion.

In my teaching, I like to see myself as a "facilitator of knowledge" and thus students' learning is a result of a variety of active learning activities, through hybrid and flipped classroom lectures, peer-reviews, seminars, laboratory and field experiences. The students are invited to create a "community of inquiry", which nowadays is as physical as hybrid, in which they learn from each other and collaborate to solve complex questions, using a critical and contructive critical approach. I am currently course responsible of the Master Thesis course (AF270X, 15 ECTS) and the Light and Science course (HS2010, 9 ECTS). Two Master thesis projects from the ALD 2023/24 class (Noura Charaf and Israa Ashraf) won, respectively, the jury and the delegates' prize at the latest Light Symposium in Norway. Here a link to all the thesis abstracts of the ALD 2023/24 class.

I have been the Director of the Light Symposium 2018 and 2015 in Stockholm and I have been nominated to the Lighting magazine 40Under40 2018 class. I'm an IALD Educator and a Lighting Detective. I love light as much as I love a beautiful shadow.