Designing with the Sun is an ongoing research project exploring personal and embodied relations to solar energy.
This research is being conducted at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences at both the Fashion Research & Technology (FRT) and Civic Interaction Design (CIxD) research groups. Angella Mackey is the principal investigator working with researcher and artist, Monserrat Vallejo.
For a long time, Western societies have been entirely disconnected from their sources of energy. Electricity comes to us in seemingly magical ways, without us truly understanding the material and technological infrastructures that support energy, let alone the tangible consequences. This disconnection contributes to an ongoing assumption that we should have access to electricity at all times, without interruption, which is simply not sustainable.
With solar energy, we have the opportunity to gain a new understanding of energy. Because we can see and feel it, it offers us the ability to tune our energy use towards its availability or lack there-of. Therefore, this project investigates what this new relation can mean for solar design.
DESIGN EXPLORATIONS
As design researchers we have been investigating what it means to gain a more direct and visceral relationship to the sun with regards to energy use. I began this investigation by powering my smartphone with a portable solar panel for 12 months (still ongoing), forcing myself to become dependent on the flows of the sun. Together with Monserrat, this led to further experiments involving house plants, and constructing "solar ears" (based on the solar sound module by Ralf Schreiber) to hear the variances in solar energy throughout the days and months.
What we have discovered so far is that relating to solar energy in more embodied ways can lead to a more informed and a more balanced relationship with the energy we use. That is, when we insert ourselves directly into the system of collecting energy and using it, it can lead to deeper understandings of our energy systems and lead us to act more “reasonably” within that system.
We have since shared these experiences with the solar design community through workshops and presentations (e.g. the Solar Biennale 2022, the Warming Up festival 2022) with many enthusiastic responses to our approach. We will continue to build on these explorations and learn what they can mean for solar design.