Student team Team IGNITE: Art & Tech Innovation at TU Eindhoven

Art & Tech

We are Team IGNITE: a student team from Eindhoven University of Technology full of creative engineers who are once again on their way to GLOW, the annual light festival in Eindhoven with 750,000+ visitors. As the first Art & Tech student team in the Netherlands, we highlight the creative side of technology to stimulate innovation. The fusion of art and tech is not only new and trendy, but also a vision of the future. We currently have about 40 members from various backgrounds who together represent the creative power and technical know-how of students. This includes combining the creative problem solving of industrial design with the technological insights of electrical engineering students and enriching it with a psychology and technology perspective.

Our team functions as something we call an ‘educational playground’, where students have the freedom to experiment, improve and take risks. We constantly challenge ourselves, work together with stakeholders and partners from the Brainport region, and create high-quality interactive light installations for various contexts in which we bring together the two sides of technology and art with light, with the ultimate goal of uniting people.

Highlighting the human side

We strive to promote connections between people through the powerful medium of light. Our artworks add interactivity and the unique perspective of students to the festival. ‘GLOWBLE,’ winner of the audience award at GLOW 2023, is a giant luminous ball measuring 3.5 metres in diameter that invited visitors to participate in the artwork. Smart technology transformed visitors' sound into enchanting animations. Teun van Roosmalen, a designer on our team, describes this as “Digitisation can contribute to more contact at a distance. We want to use technology in a different way, namely to bring people together physically”. Previous projects, such as ‘Ballroom’, where people danced with light and each other, or ‘Unplugged’, where people let the light burn through a human circuit themselves, show our commitment to innovation as a powerful tool for social impact.

Bright spots in student life

Originating from various project groups and a shared interest in light, Team IGNITE offers a home for students with that extra bit of ambition and the motivation to gain knowledge and apply it in works of art in practice. Since 2017, we have been building a close-knit student community ‘united by light’, which continues to grow. Our teams work intensively together on three or more projects at the same time, varying from light festivals to more permanent contexts. It teaches us the power of collaboration between disciplines, but fun and a good atmosphere are also central within the team. ‘I joined to learn something outside my studies and that happened, but it doesn't end there for me. Now I enjoy continuing to work with the group of friends for life that I have built up,’ says Lieke Diederen, Communications Manager. Being part of Team IGNITE is not just about working hard. Ivy van Dongen, Team Manager, describes it as a team ’where everyone can be themselves, contribute in their own way and learn something.’