Solight Design Founder Alice Chun Invented Collapsable {Photograph} voltaic Lanterns

Solight Design well-known that “when the photograph voltaic goes down, 1.6 billion folks dwell with out entry to electrical energy and depend on kerosene to delicate their night time.” For the corporate’s founder and CEO, Alice Min Soo Chun, this was unacceptable.

Chun merged experiences as an development professor, a daughter of designer mother and father, and a involved, research-savvy mom to create a charitable company that brings healthful delicate to at-risk lives all through the globe. Solight Design’s award-winning, origami-inspired, “self-inflating” lanterns use image voltaic know-how and light-as-air, eco-friendly, and malleable offers to harness the photograph voltaic’s vitality.

Having earned a USPTO Patents for Humanity Award, a MoMA current, and the eye of the Clintons (exhibiting in 2019’s The E e e book of Gutsy Girls together with Apple TV’s 2022 docuseries Gutsy), Chun is a modern-day heroine inventor.

“I’ve to encourage women and youthful women to get within the market and observe their wants and invent,” Chun totally tells us. “There’s solely eight p.c women on patents in america Patent and Trademark Workplace.”

Inexperienced Factors spoke with Alice Chun about her influential upbringing, Solight Design’s charitable initiatives, and the considered a “image voltaic life-style.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for dimension and readability.

GREEN MATTERS: What impressed you to begin Solight Design?

ALICE CHUN: I used to be a professor in Building and Provides Expertise at Columbia Faculty and at Parsons The New School for Design. I actually ran a offers lab, researching primarily most likely essentially the most sustainable merchandise and attempting to get away from petrol-based plastics. My focus turned to image voltaic vitality after the beginning of my son.

Elements like native local weather change, air air air pollution, and fossil gasoline utilization provided an eye-opening expertise. How can I assist via new merchandise that harness image voltaic vitality? I began stitching image voltaic panels to materials.

{Photograph} voltaic lights inside the market had been all heavy, exhausting, plastic, cumbersome, and non-recyclable. Polycarbonate is among the many many most poisonous plastics with regards to embodied vitality and toxins from the manufacturing of it. Solight Design makes use of recyclable, biodegradable, non-toxic offers for our merchandise. No PVC, no vinyl.

GM: How did your upbringing impact the fashionable design of your lanterns?

AC: My father was an architect and my mom was an inside designer together with a painter/muralist. My upbringing was very open to creativity and creativeness. We grew up fairly poor, so my mother and father made their very private furnishings.

I am Korean, and my mom taught me origami. The SolarPuff is determined by the origami balloon. You may flat-pack it, and in addition you then pull the handles and it pops open into a superb attempting dice. It is made with tri-axial weave sailcloth provides, which is indestructible. I attempted to make it as delicate as attainable to chop again transport prices.

GM: Solight Design’s web site states: “Each time you select clear delicate it is a big specific explicit individual step inside the route of an additional sustainable, image voltaic life-style.” Are you able to elaborate?

AC: Some workplace buildings have lights on always. What if we would harness ample of the photograph voltaic’s vitality to dwell our lives in its place of harnessing vitality for surplus? I think about we’ll decrease our carbon footprint that technique.

GM: Inform us about Solight Design’s charitable initiatives!

AC: In 2015, we did a Kickstarter. Nepal had this big earthquake that yr, and we talked about to our Kickstarters, “You can purchase to present a lightweight to Nepal.” We raised half 1,000,000 {{{dollars}}} in 30 days and had been able to ship 1,700 lights. That began our company.

After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, there have been about 2 million folks with out electrical energy. We had been able to get higher from 100,000 lights to to assist the victims. I used to be given a small award by the Clinton Basis.

We even have a humanitarian mission for the Navajo Tribe kids in Utah. In exact reality, of the 300,000 folks on that reservation, 60 p.c haven’t obtained working water or electrical energy.

Closing yr it was Ukraine, Turkey, the fires in Maui, the earthquake in Marrakesh. We’re nonetheless sending lights to Ukraine, and we’re attempting to ship to each Israel and Gaza. We’re not affiliated with every, we care relating to the kids.

Now we have a “Give a Delicate” web internet web page, nonetheless we furthermore donate lights ourselves, together with 10 p.c of earnings.