Solight Design well-known that “when the photograph voltaic goes down, 1.6 billion folks dwell with out entry to electrical vitality and rely on kerosene to mild 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 mild to at-risk lives all through the globe. Solight Design’s award-winning, origami-inspired, “self-inflating” lanterns use {photograph} 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 information of Gutsy Girls together with Apple TV’s 2022 docuseries Gutsy), Chun is a modern-day heroine inventor.

“I’ve to encourage ladies and youthful ladies to get out there available on the market and observe their wants and invent,” Chun totally 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 considered a “{photograph} voltaic life-style.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for measurement 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 College and at Parsons The New College for Design. I actually ran a offers lab, researching mainly primarily probably the most sustainable merchandise and attempting to get away from petrol-based plastics. My focus turned to {photograph} voltaic vitality after the beginning of my son.

Components 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 {photograph} voltaic vitality? I began stitching {photograph} voltaic panels to material.

{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 when it comes 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 trendy 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 attempting dice. It is made with tri-axial weave sailcloth provides, which is indestructible. I attempted to make it as mild as attainable to scale back transport prices.

GM: Solight Design’s web site states: “Each time you select clear mild it is an enormous particular particular person step inside the course of a extra sustainable, {photograph} voltaic life-style.” Are you able to elaborate?

AC: Some workplace buildings have lights on continuously. 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 take into account we’re going to 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 purchase to present a lightweight to Nepal.” We raised half 1,000,000 {{{dollars}}} in 30 days and had been in a position 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 vitality. We had been in a position 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 children in Utah. In exact fact, of the 300,000 folks on that reservation, 60 p.c haven’t acquired working water or electrical vitality.

Remaining 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 youngsters.

Now we have a “Give a Mild” web internet web page, however we furthermore donate lights ourselves, together with 10 p.c of income.