Street Lighter, created as part of Coral Manton’s MyWorld Creative Technologist in Residence Fellowship with Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC), made its joyful debut at the Retrofit Street launch event on Andover Road, where residents, families, and neighbours gathered to celebrate the season together and the launch of Andover Road’s Retrofit Street project.
The project was developed in collaboration with WeCanMake and inspired by one of the street’s most cherished festive traditions: the spectacular Christmas light display created each year by residents Ian and Anne. Their home, glowing with colour and raising money for local charities, has become a beacon of community spirit. Street Lighter was created to honour that tradition — and to invite young people on the street to help shape their own piece of festive play.
Built using an Arduino Mega, eight 144-pixel Neopixel strips, eight LED arcade buttons, a large light strip, and a custom Arduino sketch, Street Lighter transforms collaborative play into a burst of shifting colour. Players work together to keep a single “light ball” — a bright yellow LED — bouncing between the strips. When the group manages a successful rally, all eight light columns erupt into a celebratory animation, filling the structure with festive flashes of colour.
To design the game, Coral ran LED programming and game design workshops with young residents of Andover Road. Together, they learned how LEDs work, designed their own lighting effects, and co-created the rules of the game — including difficulty levels, colours, scoring and victory animations. The result is a playful, glowing installation shaped by local imagination.
The housing for Street Lighter — a house-shaped with a loft full of lights — was designed with Chris Ingram, KWMC’s Production and Workshop Manager. Built in The Factory using digital fabrication tools, the structure gives the game a bright, welcoming presence during winter evenings.
At its launch, Street Lighter sat proudly beside Ian and Anne’s dazzling Christmas display, and it quickly became a highlight of the night. Young people who helped build the game introduced it to neighbours, and throughout the event teams gathered around, laughing and cheering as bursts of colour signalled their shared success.
Looking ahead, there are plans to continue developing Street Lighter in the new year — both as a workshop model for teaching game design and LED programming, and as a potential travelling installation that could appear at future light festivals. For now, though, it stands as a joyful reminder of what creative technology can bring to a community at Christmas: warmth, colour, collaboration, and a reason to gather together.