Designing with the Sun is an ongoing design research project exploring personal and embodied relations to solar energy.
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 it—let alone the tangible consequences. This disconnection contributes to ongoing assumptions 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 new understandings of energy. Because we can see and feel it, it offers the ability for us to tune our energy usage towards its availability or lack there-of. This project investigates what this new relation could mean for solar design.
This research is based at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences with the Civic Interaction Design (CIxD) research group. Angella Mackey is the Principal Investigator. At different moments, we have partnered with Pauline van Dongen Studio, Biosphere Solar, and Amsterdam Energie as part of our investigation into the practical applications of this research.
DESIGN EXPLORATIONS
I began this investigation by powering my smartphone with a portable solar panel for one year (documentation video), forcing myself into a dependent relationship with the sun. With my co-researcher, Monserrat Vallejo, this led to further experiments where we creating "solar ears" (based on the solar sound module by Ralf Schreiber) to hear variances in solar energy throughout the days and months in our environment. What we discovered is that relating to solar energy in more embodied ways can lead to more “balanced” uses of energy. That is, when we insert ourselves directly into systems of collecting and using energy, we gain deeper understandings of it as a material thing, which instinctively leads us to act more reasonably within that system (not over-consuming).
More can be read about these explorations here: Becoming Solar: Towards More-Than-Human Understandings of Solar Energy (2023) and What Comes After Noticing?: Reflections on Noticing Solar Energy and What Came Next (2025) << received Best Paper Award
We have also shared these experiences through workshops and presentations - the Solar Biennale 2022, the Warming Up festival 2022, Dutch Design Week 2023, CHI 2025 Yokohama - with many enthusiastic responses to these ideas.
This research is ongoing. See updates here. Further documentation below:
