The Sun Light

a solar powered street lamp

Stanford University, ME101: Visual Thinking, 2 week project

Challenge

Find a “bug” in the world that you want to fix, and create a prototype and renderings of your solution.

Ideation

In order to come up with a project that I felt passionate about, I came up with more that 60 “bugs” that I thought could be improved. I narrowed these down to two ideas, and eventually after researching both, I decided to focus on street lamps. Particularly on Stanford’s campus, the street lamps are beautiful but extremely inefficient.

As a solution, I decided that I might be able to improve the efficiency and reduce the light pollution created by adding a solar panel to the top of the lamp that doubled as both a solar panel during the day and a reflector during the night.

Prototyping

After deciding on a solution, I created a lo-res prototype to show the general idea.

Final Renderings

The Sun Light is a solar street lamp made with a curved solar panel dome-shaped top piece supported by metal fins. LED lights shine up toward the interior of the top piece, reflecting downward to create an even, diffuse light. The top piece also acts as a protector, stopping the light from bouncing toward the sky and reducing light pollution.