Speaker Introduction – Marjan van Aubel
It has been a while since I came across Marjan van Aubel’s work. As I am a curious person, i was instantly hooked: A glass table surface, warm amber, almost glowing, that charges your phone. A stained-glass window that generates electricity. A solar lamp that brings the sun indoors and powers itself. Well, the technology is real. The research is serious. And yet the objects are beautiful in a way that we are not thinking of, when we think about “solar design”.
I directly thought that this combination is rare and it is exactly the kind of thing that belongs on the beyond tellerrand stage. It took a while, but now I am super excited that Marjan van Aubel joins the 15th anniversary edition of beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf.
So who is Marjan van Aubel?
Marjan is a Dutch solar designer. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy before completing her MA in Design Products at the Royal College of Art in London in 2012. From there, she built a studio and a practice that has been asking a single, urgent question ever since: why does solar energy have to be ugly?
The standard answer – silicon panels on rooftops, vast industrial farms in distant fields – treats solar as infrastructure. Useful, but separate from daily life, separate from beauty, separate from the objects we actually live with.
Marjan’s answer is different. Every surface is an opportunity. Every object we make could be harvesting light. The question is whether we have the motivation and the imagination, to design it that way.
The Current Table (2014) has a warm solar surface that collects diffuse light and lets you charge devices via USB. Current Window (2015) uses dye-sensitised solar cells in coloured glass. A modern stained glass window that generates electricity. Sunne is a self-powered solar light designed to hang in front of a window. It collects energy during the day and emits light at night. It won Dezeen’s Lighting Design of the Year in 2021 and Wallpaper’s Life Enhancer of the Year in 2022. Her work is in the permanent collections of MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the V&A in London, the Vitra Design Museum and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
She designed the solar roof of the Dutch Pavilion at the Dubai World Expo. It is made of transparent organic photovoltaic cells that form skylights, harvest energy, and can be disassembled and reused. She co-founded the Solar Biennale and The Solar Movement. In 2022 she published Solar Futures: How to Design a Post-Fossil World with the Sun. A book that looks at the past, present, and possibilities of solar energy through the lens of design.
Design as Argument
What strikes me most about Marjan’s work is that it is making an argument through objects. Not through a manifesto, not through data, not through guilt. Through things that are genuinely desirable. Things you would want to live with, even if you had no particular interest in energy transition.
In my personal opinion that is the solution for a lot of things in technology and software, to be honest and it is a much harder thing to do than it sounds. Most attempts to make sustainability beautiful end up as compromise, aren’t they? Either the design is softened until the message disappears or the message is foregrounded until the design becomes didactic. I think Marjan manages to hold both. The beauty is the argument. The objects do not represent a better future, they show how a better future looks and feels like ;)
Why You Should Be Excited
I am always trying to bring people who think across disciplines together. Between design and technology, between craft and culture, between what we make and what it means even. Marjan does this very well, but with an urgency and a poetic that I think will resonate with the beyond tellerrand audience.
She talks about a positive future. Not naively, she knows the scale of what needs to change, but with genuine conviction that design has a role to play and that the role is not just to signal values but to materialise them.
As you can see from what and how much I have writte: I am excited and maybe I made you excited also with this blog psot. Don’t miss out!