Two sets of customers pay at a till. The first group are polite, ask to use the chip and PIN machine and generally leave a tip. The second are rude and more likely to start hammering in their PIN code without checking. The difference? The first group paid in a warm, white light and the second in a very cool light.

In collaboration with the municipality of Eindhoven and the Intelligent Lighting Institute at Eindhoven University of Technology (which conducted the cash register research), Philips is fitting the Stratumseind's 25 streetlights with connected, controllable RBG lightbulbs in a bid to make barhoppers behave more like those first customers. The project, which will run for four years, is named “De-escalate” and the Stratumseind the “Living Lab”.

“Research on behaviour in different types of light has been done but never outdoors and never on this scale,” says von Dlemm. “People start behaving differently when there's a low light level, they feel like they're not noticed and do all sorts of things they wouldn't usually do.

In the home, we have Philips' Living Colours and Hue bulbs that influence atmosphere. So it was logical to see how it could influence the outdoor atmosphere. We feel that coloured lighting can have a positive effect on escalations.”

Tweaking will involve the colour, tone and intensity of the lights and won't actually begin until November but the Stratumseind already has a system in place to increase the brightness of streetlights from 5 lux to 20 lux when there's an incident. This helps the police and medical staff to do their jobs properly but also means that crowds gather to have a look.

"They say 'Something's going on over there." One thing we're going to do research on is how to get people out of there. If you increase a light setting on the other side of the street, people will move out of the way of the incident."