CLIENT:                     Designskolen Kolding

PROJECT DATE:       2011

COLLABORATION:   Christopher Helm-Hansen, Laura Locher, Lisa Fee Paura, Tuomas Sahramaa & Jeppe Jeppesen

 

In late 2011 I was nominated to attend the Design Camp run by the Designskolen Kolding in Denmark.  It was a fantastic opportunity to meet and work with some of the very best design students from universities all over the world.

The topic of design investigation was: how to make electricity tangible?  The underlying issue is that electricity appears more as an idea rather than a physical object, and thus it is difficult to understand in terms of saving…what is a kilowatt?

Our team decided to target children as the future users, and we needed to understand what they thought electricity was: “Lightning hits the earth, is saved in the ground and then ‘bubbles up’ though the walls to the plug” said our pre-school users, not understanding the correlation to the big wind turbines on the Danish horizon.

We eventually made a windmill to illustrate that electricity has an input and an output that are directly linked.  As the windmill spins it lights an LED that can be channeled via fiber optic cable to light model houses etc.  Children can play with this modular system and intuitively understand that electricity works in a linked system.  We made several versions and received very favorable feedback from the panel of experts judging the entries.