Hasta La Gadget!

Designer Abhinav Dapke has come up with a green lighting concept that appears to be modeled on the easy old-school chore of taking out the laundry to be dried by the sun.

His Go Rack design centers around a combo cloth that is layered with flexible OLED displays, solar cells, and a textured, safety plastic. A person simply takes out the light ‘ironing board/clothes rack’ body outside, unspools the legs, and places the backside of the cloth (the solar cells) in an optimal angle to receive sunlight. In order to let a user know the power charge level, a small time indicator is also embedded on the side of this cloth. 

Once the panel is full, the body is once again erected, the cloth is folded in (exposing only the plastic) and the aluminum legs are used to conduct energy, once connected to a base inside a home. Presumably, you can then use the regulator switch to modulate the level of illumination. The brightness of the light, if and when this concept is ever brought to light, will depend on the materials chosen for the plastic.

I like this idea mainly because it’s a simple, probably cheap way to bring solar light into the home without re-building the whole structure of a house. But there are potential problems. The single Go Rack won’t be enough to provide enough lighting for a whole house. Also, the body of the rack needs to be engineered with enough safety features that transferring the aluminum legs after days left out in the sun can’t lead to scalding injuries, and the OLED layers need to be durable enough to withstand the constant folding.

Still, it’s a quality concept that we’d love to check in action in the next few years.