Rocking Powered Murakami Chair by Rochus Jacob

Why waste valuable kinetic energy created while leisurely rocking when you could power an OLED lamp while doing so? That's probably the question that spurred on this design by Rochus Jacob, resulting in the Murakami Chair...

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.

The Murakami Chair shared 1st prize of the Designboom Green Life Competition. More details and photos here.

Comments (2)

Lovely idea, but the amount of electricity generated by rocking has got to result in a pretty miniscule amount of light, even for OLED. That, and this will be ridiculously expensive considering the compact gadgetry involved. Why not save your money and install solar panels or a wind turbine if you really want to go green?

posted by ChristopherB on October 15th 2009 at 2:28pm
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Forget going green -- I love it just for the simple elegant lines and having one less cord to hide or trip over. But it drives me batty when you post these design concepts that never seem to turn into purchasable products.

Maybe you could do a round-up sometime of "Concepts we've featured that can now be purchased" with links to the stores and such?

posted by muddlizard on October 15th 2009 at 6:25pm
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