Solar Culture Club
Marjan van Aubel in her Amsterdam studio (photo: Renée de Groot)
I went into my interview with solar designer Marjan van Aubel expecting to quiz her on the photon-absorbing properties of dyes; discuss the material impact of titanium dioxide versus silicon semiconductors; or reflect on the refractive qualities of crystal and glass. A lover of all things popular science, I felt that interviewing van Aubel on her work would be a trekkie’s equivalent of interviewing Scotty on the Starship Enterprise: I had a fan’s overly confident grasp of the theory and was eager to coo appreciatively at sleek-looking tech.
An hour and a half later, I left with a changed perspective. Van Aubel is making objects, sure, and covetable ones at that. She was happy to talk about her range of work, and the constraints and considerations that go into it, but I got the sense that this wasn’t where the real challenge lay for her. Van Aubel knows her field well enough to use whatever technology is best suited to a particular project at a particular time; she knows what’s out there and that the field of solar energy is constantly changing. The challenge is more philosophical than technological: how can we change people’s expectations of and behaviour around solar power?
The result of these questions is that the objects van Aubel creates are teasers – little temptations to persuade us to jump aboard her wider working ideology of “Solar Democracy”. She describes this as the idea of “solar energy for everyone, everywhere,” and it’s this last word that best captures the concept. Instead of thinking of solar power as just another source of electricity supplying your mains, van Aubel wants a world populated by objects generating a little bit of their own power, from the sun, all of the time. It’s a shift in perspective about how we handle energy production and consumption.
Materialising on my screen, van Aubel’s Amsterdam studio glows with pale daylight and is soundtracked by alarmingly loud birdsong. The studio is a tall white room, large trees rustling behind its sash windows, and the only object in the foreground is a grid made from racks of incubated plants. Everything seems light, airy, alive.
Van Aubel says that she turned to solar design because it seemed obvious: every flat surface is an opportunity to collect energy, a plane which ought to be harvesting photons. But at present there aren’t the products, nor often the tech, to take advantage of this. As such, van Aubel has focused her career around working with universities or research groups, rather than brands. Power Plant (2018), for instance, was developed in conjunction with Het Nieuwe Instituut and the University of Amsterdam, among others, manifesting as a greenhouse structure with panes of transparent solar cells that power a hydroponic system nurturing plants growing within. Current Table (2014), meanwhile, has a warm orange solar surface, like a sheet of boiled sweets, which collects energy from diffuse light to let you charge devices via a USB port: it was developed through a grant from the Dutch Stimuleringsfonds. Current Window (2015) was created through this same fund, and is much the same as its table stablemate, but works on the perpendicular plane and features eye-catching variegated colours and patterns compared to its horizontal counterpart: a modern stained glass window. The Energy Collection (2012), one of van Aubel’s earliest solar pieces, was built on technology developed at the EPFL and formed into a set of solar charging glassware, which discharge their collected energy into a battery storage cabinet as another helpful USB charging point.
Her momentum is growing. Van Aubel is now working on the Dutch Biotope for the Dubai World Expo 2020, a vast conical pavilion of plants and fungi, topped with a solar power stained glass roof that sends electricity back into the grid. The project was delayed by Covid-19, but is now scheduled to open in October 2021. These delays have, however, allowed her to focus on another project. Sunne is a solar powered light that has launched on Kickstarter as the first of van Aubel’s objects to have a more direct commercial focus – this is something for people to want and buy.
Sunne is a sleek lozenge shaped pendant light, which hangs from two wires suspended from fastenings that screw into the ceiling. It has three different ombre LED light settings: ‘sunne rise’ and ‘sunne’ set shine with different saturated hues, while ‘sunne light’ offers a warm task light glow. It’s the first product in her plan to build a solar brand, with the aim to make this technology more pervasive in everyday life and bring solar powered products into people’s homes. Part of this process is creating products that help people integrate their expectations around solar power into their lives. Key to Sunne’s development is an accompanying app that lets the user know how much charge Sunne is collecting, and how many hours it will shine for. It also offers adjustable brightness settings to adapt its output accordingly. Without the need for a power socket or wiring, van Aubel likens Sunne to a house plant – it’s relatively easy to unscrew and move around depending on how much light it needs and what you require.
Despite being directed toward the consumer market, Sunne does not depart from van Aubel’s typical development methods. To create a competitive technology for market, she partnered with the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN.TNO). The plan is to make roughly 200 lights for the initial backers, while concurrently refining the design of the appliance and setting up a viable procurement and production line. The plan is to scale up and reduce costs to eventually sell Sunne to everyone. It’s the first step for van Aubel, both for her brand and her revolution.
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Evi Hall I wanted to start with Sunne – am I pronouncing it correctly?
Marjan van Aubel Yeah, it’s the Old English for sun, so you say “sun” and then “nuh”. It comes from the English language, but it sounds very Swedish. You hang Sunne inside, in front of a window. On one side there are solar panels that charge during the day, while the other side contains a light. Sunne detects the amount of light it receives and can turn on automatically when it gets dark. You get this moment when the sun sets and Sunne starts to shine. I think of it as the first step in considering how we can make all of our objects solar-powered, and change the way we handle energy.
Evi Why did you launch this on Kickstarter? Is the lighting industry not interested in embracing solarpowered products?
Marjan It’s different than a conventional lighting project, because there isn’t a solar-powered brand yet – it’s new for everyone. I’ve had lots of conversations with different brands, but I actually find that it’s really satisfying to do it yourself. You learn a lot. I remember when I was working with Swarovski, [1] it felt like I made the drawings and then, all of a sudden, the object was actually there. It went from design to product so quickly, and I wasn’t involved in the part I enjoy the most which is the development stages. It’s a lot of work but I enjoy thinking about how something is going to be made, what it’s going to be made of, and what goes where. What I like about using Kickstarter is that you can test things: if no-one wants them, it’s not a big risk because you haven’t got the development costs that you might get with conventional production. Also, you reach a bigger audience, so your backers become your advocates. Now we have backers all over the world; it’s the first step in seeing if the world is actually ready for something like this.
Evi In a lot of your previous works you’ve used dye-sensitised solar cells, which use pigments to absorb photons and generate current. Is that the same technology in Sunne?
Marjan Sunne uses a different technology called SunPower cells, which are currently the strongest in the market. The dye cells are so specific – they work much better in lower light levels, for instance – that the market for them is not very big. If you want to make a product available to a larger group of people, then dye cells are not the best option because they’re more expensive and less commercially available. Sunne has less surface area than something big like a table, so you need stronger solar cells – these SunPower cells. The Lightyear One car [2] actually uses the same solar cells that are in Sunne – I got a research grant to work with ECN.TNO, which helped develop them. When working with the wider solar industry, I’ve found that people are usually concerned with how you can make the biggest possible impact. So you have to think about scale. For instance, the industry was previously very interested in calculations around how many solar panels people might need on their houses to meet energy demands, but that didn’t account for the fact that not enough people actually want these panels because, most of the time, their integration is quite poorly done. So now they have really shifted their focus to seeing how we can improve that as well. How can we work with design, for example: can you develop a technique where you can print on solar panels, or change the look of them? The people at ECN.TNO have been super interested in that. I think they were keen to test my ideas out.
Evi In Current Table, the colour of the solar panel determines how much light it absorbs. Can you explain a bit more about how colour and technology interplay?
Marjan It varies with different technologies. So, for example, I’m designing the roof of the Dutch pavilion at the World Expo and that uses organic photovoltaic cells.[3] These also use the properties of colour, like dye-sensitised solar cells, but the chemistry works very differently. So with organic photovoltaic cells, blue is the most efficient colour, whereas with dye cells it isn’t. It really does depend on the chemistry and technology you use. For Sunne, it’s just using one type of cell, which is very dark blue. Because the solar panel is so thin and fragile, you have to think about how it has been laminated and what kind of filter you put on top. Mostly when you see a solar panel on a roof, for example, there’s a piece of glass on top of it which is quite bulky. I didn’t want that for Sunne, because glass reflects light, so you lose a lot of photons and Sunne is already behind a window. So the cells are all laminated on the panel in series, and the surface is matte which helps with making the solar panel as invisible and efficient as possible.
Evi What can consumers expect from Sunne? Should they have the same expectations as they would from conventional lighting?
Marjan It’s a “natural” light: if there’s no sun, then it doesn’t work. Going back in time to when we used sailing boats, for example, if there was no wind, then you couldn’t sail. It wasn’t this thing that was there all the time like taking electricity from the socket. Solar is a different way of looking at and using energy. The sun is our most reliable energy source because it’s always there, but it’s not always shining everywhere equally, so it’s a question of what technologies we use to counterbalance this. Wind and solar are quite compatible in a way – when there’s no sunshine, very often there are wind and storms. You could also have technologies around that in your home, for example. I think of it as small systems, instead of big installations, which can be integrated more into the things we use.
Evi So what brought you to solar power and not wind?
Marjan It’s more tangible. If you look at a small solar cell, you see a surface that’s activating as a material: it takes in light and converts it to something else. Wind is so… foooffff! You have to build a massive wind tower, which is so far from our human scale. Solar is something that we can learn more about and integrate more in our environment. It’s something you can actually use as a material and design with. I’m fascinated with how a material can take in sunlight and, because of its chemistry, turn that into current. I think this love of solar happened after I graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2012. I was doing different things at the time, but when I moved back to the Netherlands four years ago, I decided to purely focus on solar because it gave me the most energy. After moving back here I found I was much closer to the research, the universities and what was going on in the industry, which made things much easier. Looking back over the past few years, you can see the technology is changing quite quickly and slowly simultaneously, but the mentality of where we want to go with solar is becoming much more aligned. I’m no longer the weird girl wanting to do something with solar. There’s much more support now.
Evi What are the expected lifespans of your objects?
Marjan All the materials and technology that I use can last for 40 years. For Sunne, I’ve really thought about how to make it circular and modular, so you can take the parts apart and re-use them. The only problem now is the battery – it doesn’t have a long lifecycle because it works with battery cycles. That’s an issue, but at the same time it’s also a matter of programming the battery so that it doesn’t overcharge. You need to know the limits of your technology. But so many new things are happening in the field that it’s also about looking further than the obstacles that are here right now. So far, the solar industry only looks 40 years ahead, but what if we look to the next 100 years? What will happen with the materials we use then? What do we want our world to look like and, more importantly, how are we going to build this world based on that vision? I think we have to be aware now such that we don’t make the wrong decisions. Do we really want to fill our landscapes with big solar parks? I’m not sure that’s the way to go, which is why it’s important that design comes in now. There’s a designer called Pauline van Dongen, for instance, who integrates solar into fashion. We knew each other’s work in the past, but it wasn’t until we properly met that we were both struck by the fact that people in this field exist in silos. We all talk about and want the same thing, but we never talk about it with each other. Because of this we started a “solar movement”. We’ve had a couple of sessions now with people from industry and philosophers, which have been focused on how we can change the narrative of solar power. Often if you talk about solar design in public, the responses you get go something like, “OK, so, are you making them super efficient or cheap? What’s the pay back time?” These questions are ones that, as users and consumers, we’re all trained to ask. But in a lot of countries, solar has already become the cheapest source of energy: it’s not a debate anymore. The questions should be about what we want from solar and how we are going to design that. Institutions and researchers are going towards that, but how can we do it together? Coming back to design, we’re organising a Solar Biennale next year in the Netherlands to show all these new potential possibilities.
Evi What have you learnt from working with each other?
Marjan Everyone has different expertise, but we are all aligned in how to we want to get to this future. So we are on the same page, but how do we also get architects and designers to look at solar like this? How can we do the same for the broader audience of end users and consumers? How can we change their perspectives? That’s our main question: how do we get there and what steps do we need to take? So the main location of the Solar Biennale will be Het Nieuwe Instituut, and it will not only be a showcase of solar technologies, but also include researchers from the institute tackling issues like materiality. The aim is to enlarge this solar movement through workshops, lectures, and events like the biennial. Another key area to look at is how we can change policy. The current regulations for a building in 2040 stipulate that everything has to be CO2 neutral, but why can’t we change the way we build so that every house could harvest a certain amount of energy? Installing solar panels on a roof is expensive, so why can’t we have different loans from banks where the pay back time is better integrated? All these different questions arise when we’re talking to people with different kinds of expertise.
Evi What do you think about the fact that solar cells require the extraction of metals, and therefore contain a lot of embodied carbon? We often focus on questions of efficiency and production issues, but do you think these are fair concerns around solar technology?
Marjan I understand why we’re concerned with efficiency, because at first it was really expensive to make solar cells – you couldn’t just cover your whole roof. You’d install one panel which had to be super efficient because it was so costly, but that’s not the case anymore – it’s not as expensive as it was. Now you can have a solar panel with twice the surface area that works better, or you can have solar panels made using different materials. For example, the Dutch Expo is made out of organic photovoltaics which use recycled plastic and coloured dyes. If you compare it to one square centimetre of a traditional solar cell, then it’s less efficient. But if you look at how it’s been made and what the materials are, then arguably it’s better – we have to work with different values. It’s also about what the future impact is going to be, which is why I think it’s so important to see solar differently. Maybe we can view it as cultural. You can make art with solar energy, you can print on it, you can integrate light, like solar-powered neon, for example. Now we can have flexible solar cells, so you can have something mobile or circular – all these new things! But in our minds we still have this image of a blue panel. That’s the first thing we need to change.
Evi A lot of your work seems to be moving away from thinking of solar as a pure utility – it’s almost domesticating solar energy. You mentioned your interest in solar technology and fabric, for instance.
Marjan I’ve stopped using “solar technology” and I talk about “solar design” instead. That opens up a lot of different things, because technology is the thing we know – the blue panels you put on the roof. But if you think about solar design, it opens it up to every part of your identity. It’s asking, “What is your opinion about solar?” I’m doing a lot of research at the Sandberg Institute and writing a book about solar design, asking questions such as: what is the future of solar panels? Can it be part of our infrastructure? Can it give space instead of taking space? It’s opening up all these possibilities and the question of how we will look at solar in 100 years. If we look back, is it something we’ll be proud of? I give the example of Dutch windmills, which are basically robots from 200 to 300 years ago, and which still exist now as part of our heritage. What is the difference between those windmills and what we now view as technology? You have to look at it as technological philosophies: what is the tipping point when technology becomes something else? Our clothing, for example, is also a form of technology, but has become something else.
Evi In this analogy, do you see you see your work in solar design as more akin to modern-day wind turbines or the old Dutch windmills?
Marjan I hope this is only the beginning. Think about the architecture of the windmill and how energy harvesting is part of it – the two things enhance one another. When we’re looking at the way houses are built, think about the Ancient Greeks and how they positioned their houses such that they were built towards the sun. They lived with the sun, but now we’ve lost that connection. What if you turned it around and said, “OK, solar design has to be part of a good design. A building should harvest its own energy.” You would build differently then. We should consider a building to be broken if it doesn’t generate its own energy and that’s something I believe we’ll say in the future. Similarly, how can you grow food in a building? All these things are our basic needs, and we should start thinking about integrating them into our architecture.
Evi Before Sunne, a lot of your designs were much more passive – they were surfaces that could collect light, but which didn’t directly do anything themselves. They saved and stored energy that you could then use elsewhere. With Sunne, you’ve moved to an object that collects energy to then give it out as light. It’s a switch from a passive object to a more reciprocal one.
Marjan A table and a window are things you need anyway, so those pieces were sort of a double function. But Sunne is an autonomous object – it functions from itself. We are talking about whether you should be able to charge your phone from Sunne, but that’s not really the point. I like that it’s so autonomous and powers itself. In a way, Power Plant does that too. It’s also an autonomous system, because its “skin” is powering the inside and the growing that’s happening there. But I want to do more around this idea of what can be autonomous. How can you create shade for example, such that you protect yourself from the sun but you’re also using that power for something else? Sunne is inspired by the idea that if you look at surfaces you can see everything as a solar activator – it’s a surface that is an opportunity to harvest energy.
Evi If you had the funding, what would be your next step in solar design?
Marjan At first I thought about what would happen if you designed a large building where every surface was an energy activator: what would that look like? How would that function? But now I’m thinking bigger: you could design a whole city like this. How would the streets function if they could harvest energy and what would this energy do? How does this system work then? What is the impact? How might we live with it? But Sunne is an autonomous object – it functions from itself. We are talking about whether you should be able to charge your phone from Sunne, but that’s not really the point. I like that it’s so autonomous and powers itself. In a way, Power Plant does that too. It’s also an autonomous system, because its “skin” is powering the inside and the growing that’s happening there. But I want to do more around this idea of what can be autonomous. How can you create shade for example, such that you protect yourself from the sun but you’re also using that power for something else? Sunne is inspired by the idea that if you look at surfaces you can see everything as a solar activator – it’s a surface that is an opportunity to harvest energy.
1 The Cyanometer collection (2017) for Swarovski which used the brand’s signature crystals to concentrate light onto solar cells to increase their efficiency.
2 A long-range solar powered electric vehicle designed in the Netherlands, the first models of which are due to be released on the market in late 2021.
3 Organic photovoltaic cells use conductive organic polymers or small organic molecules to absorb photons and generate current from there.
Interview Evi Hall
Photographs Renée de Groot
This article was originally published in Disegno #29. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
Sunne’s Kickstarter closed on 2 April 2021. To find out more or join the waiting list, visit marjanvanaubel.com.