Solar-powered inflatable light to help those suffering from war and disaster

By: Alice Min Soo Chun

They say the mother of invention is Necessity and the Daughter of Invention is Curiosity. We get curious about the world and why we are here. Questions of purpose and meaning become more and more prevalent as technology replaces so many of our basic tasks.   Climate change has confronted some of us in violent ways-natural and political confluence is all interconnected from war to natural disasters. There came a time when I said “this is enough, I can’t sit by anymore, I need to do something to help.” 

Solar-powered inflatable light to help those suffering

I was teaching at Columbia University and I had already been using solar energy as my primary research topic because when my son was born with asthma, I noticed there were so many kids with asthma in the doctor’s office and then basically, after googling asthma related to pollution, 75% of the pollution in the air comes from building because of energy consumption. And this happens to be a spike and children with asthma and every urban center throughout the country. And even the world.

So that’s when I decided to focus on solar energy. Then when the Haiti earthquake happened in 2010, I quickly turned my studio round to be an Innovation Studio that helped Haiti. That’s when we realized 1.6 billion people live out without access to electricity and they use kerosene to light their world at night, which is a deadly toxic fuel.

According to The UNDP 2 million children die each year from the toxic fumes and the impoverished communities that may live on just 3 dollars a day, spend up to 30% of their income on kerosene.  I thought “what if they could save that money to use for food and clothing and education, as opposed to this deadly toxic fuel?” I researched every solar light out there. They were all heavy, bulky, utilitarian looking. I’m a Korean American and grew up doing origami as a child and I was inspired by the origami balloon, which flat packs and pops open into a cube shape. This was one of the design inspirations of the SolarPuff. 

The design process: Origami was a perfect system of folding, structure, and beauty that incorporates all our products. We saw the problems with the solar lanterns of the past where they were heavy bulky and utilitarian in design. We wanted modern simple and beautiful.  simplest of forms and it had to be light in weight to be able to ship flat and save money on shipping costs. We wanted to make sure that it could be self-inflatable or foldable/expandable so you wouldn’t have a mouth valve and there would be no need to inflate by mouth or pump.

The expandable diffuser allowed the light to glow from the cube collapsed and expanded out.  Products out there that use a mouth nozzle to inflate is problematic. The issue with a mouth nozzle is that it’s very difficult for elderly and children and then you have issues of Cholera, Ebola, Zika, Ecoli and now COVID. You don’t want the risk of any kind of disease spreading because you have to put your mouth on a nozzle and ours is the only one that that inflates on its own where it’s using origami designed to fold and flat pack and then pop open into a cube.

We do have a little hole in the diffuser part which helps it expand and contract much like a bellow. The circuit and the solar panel are in its own little bladder so it’s protected from moisture or rain or weather. But then the diffuser part expands into the cube and basically there’s a little hole so that it easily pops open into a beautiful cube of light. 

 The etymology of design is to project something into the future -something that does not yet exist. Sustainability is to protect the future from the existing dangers of the present. The demise of our environment due to climate change has deeply affected more and more of our lives in the past decade. The fact that one solar light used an hour a night instead of tapping in to the grid for light, can save 90 lbs of carbon emissions per year.

Multiply that by the US population and you save 11 billion tons of carbon emissions. The power of collective change is what seems to be the only way we are healing our environment. Our philosophy is that small things matter. If we all participated in small ways to the pollution and ruin of our ecosystem, then we all have the power to heal the system by doing small things such as using a solar light. 

The affordability of good products vs the non-affordability of bad products is what most people don’t understand. In a world where the globalization of indifference has created the demise of our planet, what we are finding is that because something is cheap or less expensive organizations opt for the cheaper item vs the value, durability, and beauty of a product.

We cannot afford the long term consequences of just considering the bottom line. It isn’t affordable if the product doesn’t work or breaks. You just continue the viscous cycle of waste and environmental degradation. We need to consider durability, value, longevity and beauty as well. Our products may be a bit more expensive but they will last longer and will give hope, wonder and awe to communities living in the dark.

We work hard to keep getting our costs down but that will require a significant scale of production. That requires us all to step forward and light the way to a brighter future. 

The future will inevitably create a broader movement towards sustainable and eco-friendly design. The pandemic has caused us all to rethink our lives and what is essential The influence of eco friendly design is one aspect of doing more with less.  It’s created a whole burgeoning industry of mobile homes, van living and tiny homes.

There is a growing desire to be free of the grid, debt, waste, and the eco-friendly mindset is the nexus of this movement. We are seeing more and more people being drawn to community, travel, off grid living due to this love of freedom and mobility. Solight-Design products have that mobility and freedom which makes it the perfect accessory to this life style. 

ABOUT ALICE:

As a little girl growing up in Seoul, Korea and then upstate New York, Alice spent many days learning how a simple fold can become structured. Origami forms were taught to her by her mother, who also taught Alice how to sew her own clothes. Always creative, fascinated by design, structure and forms, Alice studied architecture at Penn State where she obtained her undergraduate degree and went on to earn her Masters in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. 

With emerging trends in material technology resulting in smarter, lighter, faster, sustainable fabrication, Alice started to sew solar panels to fabric as early experiments for harnessing solar energy with softer, malleable material. She became focused on solar technology and finding ways to create clean energy solutions upon learning her son Quinn was diagnosed with asthma. 

While teaching as a Professor in Architecture and Material Technology at Columbia University, Alice created early prototypes of solar lights with her students. Still not satisfied, and fueled by her passion for helping the underserved, Alice invented the world’s only self-inflatable, portable solar light, eliminating the need for a mouth nozzle. This ensured a healthy, sanitary method to inflate.

Alice named this invention the SolarPuff™ and conducted three years of field testing in Haiti. In 2015 she launched Solight Design and initiated a KickStarter program with unprecedented results. She went on to win numerous awards including the US Patent Award for Humanity and her products have been exhibited at MOMA, the Modern Museum of Art in New York City.

Alice is an author, TedX speaker, and female inventor of Solight-Design and SEEU95.

She has been featured on The View, Tamron Hall, Good Morning America, MSNBC, Marie Claire’s Powertrip 2022, The Skimm, The Story Exchange, Fast Company, The New York Times, Cheddar, The Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Heavy, Men’s Journal, and was nominated for USPTO Patents for Humanitarian Winner in 2018. Alice was nominated as Forbes 50 Over 50 recognizable women of 2022. Alice was also recently featured in the new Apple TV+ show ‘Gutsy’, alongside other female rock stars such as Jane Goodall, Wanda Sykes, Meg Thee Stallion, Kim Kardashian, and others.

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