Culture
Charge Your Phone for Free on This Solar Bench
The “Soofa” has two USB charging ports and tracks data on air quality, foot traffic, and radiation.
To charge your phone in public, you can mosey into a coffee shop and tap into an electrical outlet. Or, if you happen to live in a select few cities, you can find a Soofa bench and suck up some free, clean energy.
The forward-thinking furniture, debuted last year by engineers at the MIT Media Lab (who now run Changing Environments), looks like a regular bench with a Benihana griddle stuck in the middle. That’s actually a solar panel that channels electricity via USB ports. Two people can use it at once to charge phones, tablets, and other devices. Thanks to an energy-storage feature, it can also provide juice at night.