Solight Design well-known that “when the picture voltaic goes down, 1.6 billion folks dwell with out entry to electrical energy and depend on 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 ebook of Gutsy Women together with Apple TV’s 2022 docuseries Gutsy), Chun is a modern-day heroine inventor.

“I need to encourage girls and youthful ladies to get accessible in the marketplace 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 idea of 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 Development and Provides Expertise at Columbia College and at Parsons The New Faculty for Design. I actually ran a supplies lab, researching primarily primarily essentially the most sustainable merchandise and making an attempt 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 supplied 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 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 close 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 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 is dependent upon the origami balloon. You possibly can flat-pack it, and likewise you then pull the handles and it pops open into wanting 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 on-line states: “Each time you select clear delicate it is an enormous particular specific particular person step throughout the course of a extra sustainable, image voltaic life-style.” Are you able to elaborate?

AC: Some workplace buildings have lights on persistently. What if we would harness sufficient of the picture voltaic’s vitality to dwell our lives as a substitute of harnessing vitality for surplus? I think about 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 huge 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 effectively 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 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 making an attempt to ship to each Israel and Gaza. We’re not affiliated with every, we care relating to the kids.

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