Alice Min Soo Chun is the inventor and founder of Solight-Design. Alice has been to 27 countries herself to help move people off the grid using her solar-powered lights. She holds the patent for this technology and worked with her students while she was teaching at Columbia to invent the first prototypes for the lights. The lights are now in MOMA too.
I had a chance to interview her to learn about her lights.
Where do you get your inspiration for the lights?
The design inspiration comes from the art of Origami which means “paper” and “fold” I grew up doing origami with my mother as a child and also incorporated it in to design studios when I was teaching at Columbia and at Parsons the New School. It is the perfect balance of play between imagination and discipline.
Why is it important for people to be able to have access to solar lighting?
With our planet’s demise due to pollution, extreme poverty, natural disasters, and carbon emissions, in the United States we have had a 60% increase in power outages in the last 10 years. In regions where there is no electricity families rely on Kerosene which is a deadly toxic feul which not only creates tones of carbon emissions but also causes millions of childhood deaths due to the black smoke it creates.
What was your biggest surprise with creating your company?
The biggest surprise is when I realized the impact it would have on so many lives if we were to succeed in sharing this with the world and scale it.
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