Almost a quarter of our planet’s people live without electricity. When the sun sets, their day ends, often leaving noxious oil lanterns as the only alternative to darkness. Architect Sheila Kennedy and her team at the Boston-based firm, KVA MATx (pronounced “mat-EX”), have conceived the Portable Light Project to bring solar-powered illumination into these homes, extending the possibilities for work, education, health, and good old-fashioned family time. The key to the technology is that it be, quite literally, flexible.
The core of the Portable Light Project is deceptively simple: a bright LED chip, a rechargeable battery, and a foldable, rollable solar cell. The entire unit weighs less than eight ounces and produces a remarkable ten hours of glow time for every five hours of daylight. The beauty of the project lies both in its design efficiencies and its deployment: Kennedy and her firm plan to weave the technology into the very stuff of daily life–bags, clothing, awnings, even curtains. One application of the Portable Light Project has been a collaboration between KVA MATx and Timbuk2, the well-known maker of messenger bags. Dubbed FLAP (for Flexible Light and Power), Kennedy calls it “a popup textile lantern disguised as a messenger bag.” The bag’s outer flap sports a flexible solar cell, and its reflective inner surface serves as a sort of a lamp shade, which can be separated and configured in any number of ways: now it’s a desk light, now it’s a hanging lantern.
The FLAP bag is currently being field tested by Navajo women on an Arizona reservation, among other rugged locales. “It sounds a little cliché, but light can be life changing,” says Kennedy. “If you live in a place without electricity, your life ends at sundown.” For such communities, portable light can lengthen the day and extend time for study, household economics, and basic healthcare. “That extra time can be the difference between barely surviving and adding a little bit more money to the household income.”
Kennedy has sent Portable Light kits to the Huichol, an indigenous people of the Sierra Madre Mountains in western central Mexico, who’ve incorporated the technology into their weaving crafts. In Ghana, local artisans and business people have created new backpack designs and have sewn the solar cells into kente cloth, the country’s traditional hand-woven fabric. In Kenya, a local inventor has repurposed the kits for boda-boda drivers, who ferry passengers on bicycles across the no man’s land between bordering countries’ immigration offices. With the solar panels sewn into a special vest, the drivers can now charge their cell phones (or their passenger’s) and light up the desert during night journeys.
The potential uses for flexible solar are seemingly limitless, and Kennedy is exploring ways to bring the technology into the built environment as well. She sees curtains, awnings, and the very skin of buildings as possible places to quench energy thirst. “I tell the young people I meet,” she says, “that you can’t be afraid to let design create a new vision for what energy can be.”
Jacob Gordon is a Nashville-based freelance wrier and the host of TreeHugger Radio.
