Shlomi Mir is one of Israel’s most visionary designers whose recent tumbleweed anti-desertification project earned him a Lexus Design Award alongside giants like Toyo Ito. But its his beautiful rechargeable LED bowl lamp that we are drooling over today – an elegant combination of art, design, tradition, technology and even spirituality.

Inspired by traditional Tibetan Singing Bowls, traditional mortar and pestles and modern technology, Mir designed the lamp to be meditative and functional.

Equipped with a copper coil that functions as both a reflector and energy generator, along with a low-energy Light Emitting Diode (LED) bulb, and a magnet, the lamp is recharged with kinetic energy.

But it requires a very specific kind of motion to charge this lamp – a meditative and circular motion, one that makes it easy to do a few minutes of meditation in exchange for a gentle illumination.

Related: Wind-powered Tumbleweed robot rolls back encroaching desert

It doesn’t require a great amount of force to produce the energy necessary to re-charge the lamp; instead, it rewards a gentle approach, which is so brilliant on so many different levels. What a beautiful way to incorporate a slower, more earth-connected mentality so that technology can have a beneficial impact on our lives.

Albeit still completing his studies at the Bezalel Academy of Design (where else?) in Jerusalem, Mir has an impressive design repertoire under his belt already.

“I got hooked on design building guitars and websites, spent my army service developing E.O.D.robots, and over the past few years have been developing interactive exhibits for Madatech Israel National Museum of Science, Technology & Space,” he writes on his website like it’s no big deal.

He adds, “For me, design is a bridge between different fields and disciplines, details and context, theory and practice – connecting problems to solutions.”

We couldn’t agree more.

To see more examples of fine Israeli design, be sure to check out Shlomi’s website.

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The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design graduate originally thought he would pack a bunch of seeds into the core of his Tumbleweed ball, according to Wired. But desertification is not something that can be prevented with a few seeds dropped in random parts of the desert.

Instead, a range of factors contribute to desertification, including unsustainable agricultural practices, overgrazing, mining, global warming and subsequent climate change, overpopulation, and perhaps a few factors of which we are not yet aware.

In fact, gathering the data necessary for understanding desertification can be problematic, and it this is a shortfall that Mir hopes to bridge with his autonomous design that is capable of transforming itself according to the prevailing climatic conditions thanks to its tensioned steel frame.

(Related: Mohamed Kassas – Egypt’s prophet of desertification)

Wrapped in a box kite sail that picks up wind and propels it in random directions, the Tumbleweed is equipped with a kinetically-powered on board computer, motor and sensor that help to collect climate data, along with a GPS that maps its trajectory.

While it can’t move in a specific direction, it can move long distances at significant speed, picking up information useful to science such as wind conditions – basically information that would be either prohibitively expensive for people to obtain for themselves, difficult because of topographical obstacles, or just too time-consuming given such vast distances.

One particular application, Mir told Wired, might be to create a three dimensional map of a dune in order to better understand how the dune moves. With this information, scientists might be able to achieve the ultimate goal, which is to prevent the desert from swallowing up more arable or habitable land.

:: Shlomi Mir

The post Wind-powered Tumbleweed robot rolls back encroaching deserts appeared first on Green Prophet.