Solight Design Founder Alice Chun Invented Collapsable Photograph voltaic Lanterns

Solight Design well-known that “when the photo voltaic goes down, 1.6 billion people dwell with out entry to electrical power and depend upon kerosene to delicate their night.” For the company’s founder and CEO, Alice Min Soo Chun, this was unacceptable.

Chun merged experiences as an construction professor, a daughter of designer mom and father, and a concerned, research-savvy mother to create a charitable agency that brings healthful delicate to at-risk lives throughout the globe. Solight Design’s award-winning, origami-inspired, “self-inflating” lanterns use picture voltaic know-how and light-as-air, eco-friendly, and malleable provides to harness the photo voltaic’s vitality.

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

“I must encourage ladies and youthful women to get available on the market and observe their wishes and invent,” Chun fully tells us. “There’s solely eight p.c women on patents in america Patent and Trademark Office.”

Inexperienced Points spoke with Alice Chun about her influential upbringing, Solight Design’s charitable initiatives, and the concept of a “picture voltaic life-style.”

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

GREEN MATTERS: What impressed you to start Solight Design?

ALICE CHUN: I was a professor in Construction and Supplies Experience at Columbia School and at Parsons The New School for Design. I really ran a provides lab, researching basically probably the most sustainable merchandise and making an attempt to get away from petrol-based plastics. My focus turned to picture voltaic vitality after the start of my son.

Factors like native climate change, air air pollution, and fossil gasoline utilization offered an eye-opening experience. How can I help via new merchandise that harness picture voltaic vitality? I started stitching picture voltaic panels to fabric.

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

GM: How did your upbringing have an effect on the trendy design of your lanterns?

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

I’m Korean, and my mother taught me origami. The SolarPuff depends on the origami balloon. You can flat-pack it, and also you then pull the handles and it pops open into a very good trying cube. It’s made with tri-axial weave sailcloth supplies, which is indestructible. I tried to make it as delicate as attainable to cut back transport costs.

GM: Solight Design’s website online states: “Every time you choose clear delicate it’s a huge specific particular person step within the course of a further sustainable, picture voltaic life-style.” Can you elaborate?

AC: Some office buildings have lights on persistently. What if we could harness enough of the photo voltaic’s vitality to dwell our lives instead of harnessing vitality for surplus? I consider we are going to lower our carbon footprint that method.

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

AC: In 2015, we did a Kickstarter. Nepal had this huge earthquake that yr, and we talked about to our Kickstarters, “You can purchase to current a light-weight to Nepal.” We raised half 1,000,000 {{dollars}} in 30 days and had been able to ship 1,700 lights. That started our agency.

After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, there have been about 2 million people with out electrical power. We had been able to recuperate from 100,000 lights to to help the victims. I was given a small award by the Clinton Foundation.

We also have a humanitarian mission for the Navajo Tribe kids in Utah. In precise reality, of the 300,000 people on that reservation, 60 p.c have not received working water or electrical power.

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

We have got a “Give a Light” internet web page, nonetheless we moreover donate lights ourselves, along with 10 p.c of revenue.