Real rocking power

The electricity-generating Murakami Chair wins top honors in Design Boom's Green Life design competition.

Wed, Sep 23 2009 at 12:57 PM EST

There were plenty (3709 designers from 96 countries, total!) of fascinating shortlisted entries in the running for the top prizes in Design Boom’s Green Life design competition. But one of the two designs from the first prize winner, Rochus Jacob from the U.S., is a real doozy: The Murakami Chair, a rocking chair that generates electricity and powers a built-in reading lamp when in movement.

Jacob explains how it works:

I was looking for opportunities to generate energy through activities we naturally do. The final result is a rocking chair that enables the user to experience production and consumption of electricity in a gentle and rewarding way. An abstract process becomes tangible and eventually cultivates natural awareness. Complexity is covered by simplicity. Advanced nano-dynamo technology which is built in to the skids of the chair and more efficient light sources such as the newly developed OLED generation makes it possible to build a rocking chair with a reading lamp running on electricity generated from the rocking motion. During daylight the energy gets stored in a battery pack. The construction of the flat and bendable organic light emitting diodes allows new form factors such as using the traditional shape of a lamp but instead of having a light bulb the lampshade himself turns out to be the light source. To have a drastic reduction of consumption the big challenge will be to make consuming less feel like getting more.

Pretty incredible. Congrats to Jacob. Check out his also-incredible co-winnning design, the Thermodynamic Cooler, and the rest of the entries over at Design Boom.