Solight Design Founder Alice Chun Invented Collapsable Image voltaic Lanterns

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

Chun merged experiences as an building professor, a daughter of designer mother and father, and a involved, research-savvy mom to create a charitable company that brings healthful light 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 picture voltaic’s vitality.

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

“I’ve to encourage women and youthful ladies to get obtainable available on the market and observe their wants and invent,” Chun absolutely tells us. “There’s solely eight p.c ladies 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 idea of a “image voltaic life-style.”

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

GREEN MATTERS: What impressed you to start out Solight Design?

ALICE CHUN: I used to be a professor in Development and Provides Expertise at Columbia School and at Parsons The New School for Design. I really ran a offers lab, researching primarily most likely probably 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 by the use of new merchandise that harness image voltaic vitality? I began stitching image voltaic panels to material.

Image voltaic lights inside the market had been all heavy, exhausting, plastic, cumbersome, and non-recyclable. Polycarbonate is among the many many most poisonous plastics as 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 affect the modern 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 will depend on the origami balloon. You will flat-pack it, and likewise you then pull the handles and it pops open into a superb wanting dice. It is made with tri-axial weave sailcloth provides, which is indestructible. I attempted to make it as light as attainable to scale back transport prices.

GM: Solight Design’s internet web page states: “Each time you select clear light it is an enormous particular particular person step inside the path of a extra sustainable, image voltaic life-style.” Are you able to elaborate?

AC: Some workplace buildings have lights on persistently. What if we might harness ample of the picture voltaic’s vitality to dwell our lives as an alternative of harnessing vitality for surplus? I think about we’ll decrease our carbon footprint that methodology.

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

AC: In 2015, we did a Kickstarter. Nepal had this large earthquake that yr, and we talked about to our Kickstarters, “You should buy 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 recuperate 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 youngsters in Utah. In exact fact, of the 300,000 folks on that reservation, 60 p.c haven’t acquired working water or electrical energy.

Final 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.

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