Hungarian student’s kinetic energy-powered cooler bag is a finalist in the Electrolux Design Lab 2008 competition.
The longer the walk, the cooler the refreshment at the end, thanks to E-bag, a handbag whose cooling system gets its power from being swung back and forth as its owner walks.
The appliance is one of nine finalists out of more than 600 entries from 49 countries in the Electrolux Design Lab 2008 competition. This year, the sixth year of the global contest, undergraduate and graduate industrial design students were invited to create appliance concepts for the Internet generation.
“I wanted to make a point about the way urban life goes with increased energy consumption,” says E-bag’s creator, Apor Püspöki, a product design student at Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design in Budapest, Hungary. “We have responsible design thinking.”
The E-bag has a rotating handle attached to a dynamo that charges a storage battery via arm motion. The cooling system uses so-called Peltier technology, a kind of solid- state heat pump that transfers heat from one side of the device to the other side. Cooling status is indicated by three LED lights. The capacity of the bag is approximately three liters.
