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

Solight Design well-known that “when the picture voltaic goes down, 1.6 billion individuals dwell with out entry to electrical vitality and depend upon kerosene to delicate their evening.” 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 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 supplies 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 Ladies together with Apple TV’s 2022 docuseries Gutsy), Chun is a modern-day heroine inventor.

“I need to encourage girls and youthful girls to get out there in the marketplace and observe their wants and invent,” Chun completely tells us. “There’s solely eight p.c girls 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 measurement 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 Faculty for Design. I truly ran a supplies lab, researching primarily in all probability 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 by new merchandise that harness image voltaic vitality? I began stitching image voltaic panels to materials.

{Photograph} voltaic lights throughout 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 supplies for our merchandise. No PVC, no vinyl.

GM: How did your upbringing affect the stylish 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 may flat-pack it, and in addition you then pull the handles and it pops open into an excellent wanting dice. It is made with tri-axial weave sailcloth provides, which is indestructible. I attempted to make it as delicate as attainable to cut back transport prices.

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

AC: Some workplace buildings have lights on continuously. 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 contemplate we’re going to 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 large earthquake that yr, and we talked about to our Kickstarters, “You should purchase to present a lightweight to Nepal.” We raised half 1,000,000 {{{dollars}}} in 30 days and had been capable of ship 1,700 lights. That began our company.

After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, there have been about 2 million individuals with out electrical vitality. We had been capable of 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 actuality, of the 300,000 individuals on that reservation, 60 p.c haven’t acquired working water or electrical vitality.

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 concerning the children.

We’ve got a “Give a Mild” web internet web page, nonetheless we furthermore donate lights ourselves, together with 10 p.c of income.