THE SOLAR GARDEN
A kit to harvest solar energy in the home environment, to charge your everyday mobile electronics with green energy.
Taking inspiration from vegetable gardens, The Solar Garden is a kit that helps you harvest your own daily solar energy. It simplifies the process of solar energy harvesting and makes you in charge of your own energy production.
The Solar Garden is made of a charging dock with a small solar panel (the Garden) and three mobile ceramic power banks (the Fruits). Each fruit is detachable, easy to transport and can charge different mobile electronic devices anywhere you want in your home. The Solar Garden can adapt to all types of apartment. Its design makes it easy to adapt to any interior and catch the sun in efficient ways.
The Solar Garden has not only the power to stock solar energy, it has also the power to educate the consumer indirectly. By using this product in its daily life, the consumer learns about solar energy, its efficiency, its power, how to harvest it, and what place batteries take in the process.
The Solar Garden is the fruit of six months of design research around electrical batteries, innovative ways of stocking energy and sustainability.
By making the act of harvesting solar energy close to the act of gardening, this project redefines the place of electrical batteries in daily life. The idea was to go against the tendency of shelling batteries with black plastic.
The Garden is a wooden dock, made from local cherry tree wood machined on a CNC machine, its custom PCB ensures the solar energy is sufficiently distributed between the fruits. The Fruits are custom-made & hand assembled electronics embarked on a 3D printed base. The base is housed in a high-end porcelain shell fully handmade with the help of the CERCCO team.
The garden, as well as the fruits, have been developed upon pogo-pins, spring loaded pins, that make the act of plugging the fruits to the garden as easy as simply putting it down.
CREDITS
This diploma project was achieved during my Master cursus at HEAD — Geneva under supervision of Mitch Paone.
Design & Production : Theo Francart
