Little Sun solar lamp bridges art and outreach

For school-aged children across much of the developing world, access to electrical lighting remains precarious. Many rural farming villages exist “off the grid.” Major cities from Nairobi to Kolkata are subject to regular blackouts — a phenomenon from which even the United States, as Hurricane Sandy demonstrated, is not entirely immune. Enter the Little Sun. Designed by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson and engineer Frederik Ottesen, Little Sun is a small, powerful and inexpensive solar-powered lamp. The almost shockingly bright LED, encased in tough, cheerful yellow plastic, shines up to five hours on a four-hour charge.