Category

Region

Spinning Light

Spinning Light

Category
Daylight investigations - Region 4: Asia and Oceania

Students
He Sun
Hao Liu
Xinrui Chen

Teacher
Jiankun Liu

School
Tianjin University

Country
China

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Charkha is a hand-spinning device with a wooden drive wheel and a spindle. In the 1920s, Mahatma Gandhi and other nationalists adopted it as part of their movement. Gandhi believed that the revitalization of The Indian economy must start from the revival of the spinning wheel, from which he launched the Satyagraha Movement. Charkha is often painted by Indians and even decorated with metal and glass, making spinning wheel unique from each other. They were placed in every family yard, and the women would sing hymns while spinning. For centuries, spinning and Charkha has united Indians across the country, transcends regional, caste, class, linguistic and religious diversity.

However, light conditions in India makes spinning especially difficult for housewives at night. Meanwhile, COVID-19 has seriously affected the normal lives of Indian, especially the children. The above caused our thinking: can we try to find a solution between Charkha decoration, night lighting and children’s entertainment?

We try to combine a solar lamp with a modified Charkha in order to bring lighting support for housewives’ spinning at night.

During the day, the solar lamp can store solar energy and convert it into electricity. While at night, the solar lamp can not only shed light on Charkha for the housewives to spin, but also be projected onto the wall through the blades of the spinning wheel, which provides entertainment for children.

To this end, we made the following modification of Charkha’s spinning wheel: we placed six transparent blades with a set of continuous patterns on it, so that when the wheel turns, the light is blocked by the spokes to form a strobe light, thus the patterns are projected onto the wall frame by frame. By using the persistence of vision, what children can actually see on the wall is no longer Individual, independent patterns, but a whole moving, continuous animation.

Spinning light not only solves housewives’ difficulties of spinning at night with Charkha’s decorations, but also provides interesting Light Graffiti for Indian children. We try to solve multiple problems through the modification of a daily necessity to improve local people’s lives.