Dong Hyun KimDaylight Lab · measured light, felt light
Measured測った光 Felt感じた光
Move to look · drag to turn · drag the seam
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About · through the window

Between what a meter reads and what a person feels.

Felt

I am an architect and lighting researcher. A room can pass every daylight metric and still feel harsh; a dim café can read as ‘inadequate’ and feel exactly right. My work sits in that gap — measuring light carefully with HDR imaging and photometry, and asking people what the light does to them.

Measured

  • 2026–Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, Tokyo University of Science
  • 2025–2026Postdoctoral researcher, ETH Zürich ↗
  • 2024Visiting postdoc, KTH Lighting Design ↗
  • 2021–2024Postdoctoral researcher (Swiss Government Excellence Fellow 2021–22), EPFL ↗
  • 2018–2020Postdoctoral researcher, TU Delft ↗
  • 2007–2018BSc Architectural Studies, MSc Light & Lighting, PhD Built Environment, The Bartlett, UCL ↗
Sixteen fisheye photographs of one office-like room under different lighting scenes
One office-like room, sixteen lighting scenes — fisheye photographs from the PhD experiments at UCL.
Project 01 · 2013–2018 · UCL

Light & Emotion

How does light make a room feel? My PhD argued that lighting should be designed for emotion, not only for the type of space — and put it to the test with lighting designers, in one office-like room under sixteen scenes.

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Funding
UCL Research Fellowship · Korea Engineering Industry Scholarship
Output
PhD dissertation, UCL (2018) ↗
Kim & Mansfield, Building and Environment (2021)
Kim & Mansfield, CIE Midterm Meeting (2017)
A false-colour luminance image of seven reference light sources next to a photograph of the Hidyni rig with a camera
Hidyni, the HiDyn high-contrast luminance reference: seven sources spanning six orders of magnitude, as an HDR camera measures it (left) and as it looks (right). Photo: HiDyn deliverable D1.
Project 02 · 2022–2025 · EURAMET

HiDyn

Glare is easy to feel and hard to measure. A street light against the night sky spans six orders of magnitude — far more than one camera exposure can hold. In HiDyn, a European metrology project, we tested how far HDR luminance cameras can be trusted for glare and obtrusive light, and wrote the good-practice guides that feed the standards.

HDR bracket · 0 EV
Funding
European Partnership on Metrology · 21NRM01 HiDyn
My part
Camera tests for daylight glare, quality indices, good-practice guides
Sunlight patterns cast by stripe, bamboo and Voronoi façade panels in the test room
The three façade patterns in the west-facing test room, sun in view — stripe, bamboo, Voronoi (opening ratio ≈ 0.6).
Project 03 · 2021–2024 · EPFL

Visual Comfort & Visual Interest

Do beautiful sun patterns make glare easier to live with? Thirty people worked with the sun in view behind three façade screens — stripes, bamboo and Voronoi. The pattern didn’t change how much glare they felt. How pleasant the scene felt did.

Funding
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) · Swiss Government Excellence Fellowship
Status
Manuscript in preparation
Solskin façade fully open, seen from insideSolskin façade fully closed, seen from insideopenclosed
The Solskin façade at the ZCBS Lab, ETH Zürich — drag to compare fully open (view, daylight) with fully closed (shade, electricity). HDR captures, same exposure.
Project 04 · 2025–2026 · ETH Zürich × Solskin

Solskin AI

Solskin is an adaptive solar façade: its panels follow the sun, making electricity while shading the room. Solskin AI, with ETH Zürich and Zurich Soft Robotics, uses AI to control it so that building energy, occupant comfort and each person’s needs are met at once.

Three needs, one façade

Electricity, shade, view — the façade weighs all three. Drag the point and watch the panels in the room answer.

Funding
Innosuisse — Swiss Innovation Agency
Partners
ETH Zürich ↗ · Solskin (Zurich Soft Robotics) ↗
Note
The triangle and the room are an illustration, not project data or the project’s control logic.
Collaborations

Light, shared.

  • TU DelftIndoor Environment group, SenseLab — health and indoor environment in schools, offices and hospitals
  • EPFLHDR calibration workflows and daylit sky categorisation
  • TU Delft · 3DImage-based characterisation of material optical properties
  • KTH Lighting DesignHealthy and comfortable classroom lighting
Publications

A spectrum of work

Selected

Spectrum — every line is a paper

Lead authorCo-authorReportIn progress

All publications

Contact · Tokyo

The window is open.

A new lab at Tokyo University of Science, from July 2026. Students and collaborators curious about light, perception and HDR are welcome to write.

donghyun.kim@rs.tus.ac.jp
Google Scholar ↗LinkedIn ↗
Gathering daylight0%