Wherever you go, go with all your heart – Confucius once said. Clearly, a Danish architecture student was listening.
Shocked by the scarcity of affordable clean drinking water on his trip to Chile, he developed a ceiling light with a dual function.
During the day the bowl-shaped light is filled with seawater, which is desalinized using solar energy from a counterpart bowl on the roof.
The daily outcome: around 500ml of clean drinking water. The salts are stored in copper-zinc pipes, thus becoming batteries which, powered by solar energy, light the device at night.
The design has been shared with local communities. The lamp can be made using old plastic bottles; sun and seawater are not only readily available but, crucially, free.
