Crossing the Serpentine Lake in London’s Hyde Park in total silence is one of life’s more pleasant experiences. The fact that one is moving at only five miles per hour could, in theory, taint the experience, especially in the speed-driven society we live in, but somehow it doesn’t. After all, when have you ever been on a boat sans the noise, pollution and emissions? And when have you been on a boat with an engine where once on you are still able to hear yourself think and take in your surroundings? The answer is almost surely never, until you board Christoph Behling’s 42-passenger Solar Shuttle (or any of his solar-powered ferries). Powered by a graceful canopy of 27 curving solar panels, the 48-foot-long shuttle was launched in London’s Hyde Park in the summer of 2006. Even on the sort of dark, rainy days that London is plagued with, there is enough sun to keep the ship running. And per year the boat saves 2.5 tons of CO2, compared with a diesel boat of a similar size.
So who is the man behind this elegant, award-winning and greener than green mode of transport?
Swiss-born Christoph Behling completed a Diploma in Industrial Design at the Kunstakademie in Stuttgart in 1995, then spent a year in Tokyo working on a range of product designs from kettles to glassware for Masayuki Kurokawa. The products he was making were the “very pleasant sort” that you “could do without” he says, summing up the experience.
In 1996 he came back to Germany and thought “there must be something more than hanging nice pretty products in nice, pretty places,” he says. His fascination with solar technology started that same year when a solar cell landed on his desk. “I thought how magic it was that you could make electricity out of sunlight and this blue, sparkly thing.” At the time solar cells were mainly used on roofs or hidden away whereas Behling wanted to design something that expressed the magic of solar the same way he felt about it.
In 1997 he moved to London to join Ross Lovegrove for six years as senior designer, but it was during this time that he also set up and became creative director of Kopf Solardesign, a company that built solar-powered boats. At the end of 2005 he founded SolarLab Research + Design with an unofficial brief of converting people to solar and hydrogen through seduction. “We want to inspire people,” says Behling. “We want people to say ‘wow, this is better than anything I’ve seen’.”
Making things that are better than everything else out there is something Behling feels very strongly about. “I really don’t like that whole alternative energy and alternative design thing, I think it’s bullshit,” he says. “If you went into a shop to buy some shoes and they said, ‘We don’t have the shoes you want, but we have this alternative.’ [You would think] yeah, come on! I think we can only succeed if we create solar-powered cars, solar-powered boats, that are better-looking and better-working. If we do that then I think humans will be seduced and get inspired.”
There’s still a lot of negative prejudice floating around sustainable design says Behling, who moved to Stuttgart, Germany as a boy. He teaches at the RCA and even his design students assume that designing a solar or sustainable project is going to be a really dull experience. They ask him, “Why can’t we design a sexy chair or sports car.” His answer comes in the form of his boats that quietly prove that solar-powered boats can be damn sexy. In fact, when he and his team were designing the very first solar shuttle, he had two visuals on his desk he says. One was of a satellite “because solar cells were originally intended for satellites, to make electricity in space”, the other was a “yacht that was owned by the Kennedys”, and which the powerful, famous family cruised around the New England lakes on. These two images more or less merged into the design of the Solar Shuttle and inspired the team to make everything about the boat “special”. It was designed with light and sunshine in mind, Behling says. “We looked at shadows and what kind of shadow patterns were created on the deck, and we went a bit obsessive on the whole thing,” he says. But it was very much a celebration he concludes. Of what I ask. “Of sunshine and Jackie O,” he laughs. How atypical and non-hair-shirt is that as inspiration for a highly sustainable product?
Solar is not only sexy though, is also the future, for a series of eminently sensible and practical reasons. Not least because Behling’s boats and shuttles are designed to send any excess electricity created back into the National Grid. A process that can even make you some money says Behling, one of the biggest incentives there is for going solar he believes. “Depending on which country you’re in you get more or less money, it depends on how good the lobby of the energy providers are,” explains Behling. “In Germany it is quite a nice little moneymaker because there are high incentives.”
We should all be incentivizing solar and selling back to the grid it seems because the power that is fed into the National Grid is generated by coal and nuclear power plants that produce electricity 24 hours a day at the same rate. And as it is very difficult to increase or to lower this rate, that’s why electricity is a lot cheaper at night: “because we actually don’t know what to do with it”. Obviously a lot more power is needed during the day than at night, so “solar is fantastic because you feed into the grid exactly when the grid is most hungry” he explains. I am starting to see the appeal in a big way.
Future projects on the horizon for Solarlab include Olympic and commuter boats for the River Thames, solar powered rickshaws, floating houses where the solar cells always turn towards the sun, and a possible solar powered mosque. Behling has also produced a range of product designs for global brands including TAG Heuer and Nokia. As lead designer for Tag Heuer he is the man behind some of the most ground-breaking designs in watch-making. His fascination with light and energy led to the inception of his “diamond fiction” watch in which tiny LEDs change the colour of the stones to show the time. He and his team are also researching a new technology where products are not manufactured or assembled, but rather allowed to “grow”. When Dior approached him to design the perfume bottle of the future, he came up with a prototype that required only a computer, a laser and resin.
This technique is used “quite a lot in order to make a quick prototype” Behling says, but it is not currently used in manufacturing. It does away with waste, the need for huge machinery and tools and the need to source different parts from different suppliers, thus cutting down on the amount of energy required to make the product in the first place. The finished item has only one component, instead of 11, and like everything Behling designs it is exceedingly graceful-looking. If you are wondering how the perfume would come out of the bottle (so was I), it would come out like a spray once you pressed the bottle’s thinner parts (be it made out of resin, or a metal alloy, which Behling also proposes).
These perfume flacons of the future are not yet in production, but Behling believes they have, pardon the repetition, “a future”. Also because this technology could be used to make every bottle look very slightly different. And this is another important element in the Behling philosophy of design. All products look the same because they are mass-manufactured with tools he says, and the reason we don’t value objects more is because we know that if we chuck it out are “10 million” others just waiting to replace it. If the object you purchase is the only one in the world he posits, that makes it “a bit like a handmade object, and then it has a human relation to it.” Your reaction is no longer, ‘let me chuck this’, but rather, ‘maybe I will keep it’.
And this is just the kind of human interaction, inherent sustainability and visionary design that Christoph Behling and SolarLab are all about. Oh and the designs aren’t half sexy too.
This article first appeared in issue 12 of Sublime (www.sublimemagazine.com)
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