Keep track of your power usage with solar stickers

Matt Hickey | Sep 30, 2009

(Credit: Yanko Design)

Place this one in the "interesting idea, bad execution" category.

Label With Green is a concept design by Shao Wei Huang, Chia-Yi Cho, Yu Pei Kuo, and Chung Kai Chiang that I spotted on Yanko. The idea is that you'd get a package of solar stickers, each of which powers a separate gadget component such as the display, speaker, keypad, camera, or solar battery.

Adding more stickers manually is supposed to make you more aware of how much power your device is taking up and presumably train you to adjust your behavior accordingly--whatever that might mean.

It's a cool idea in theory, but it's impractical. As fellow post fellow blogger Jaymi Heimbuch of Treehugger notes: "This idea has its heart in the right place, but unfortunately completely ignores human nature." That's entirely correct.

It's good these designers want to help the world become a greener place, but there are probably better ways to do it, especially since gadgets already in use would probably need to be re-engineered to get their power from the stickers. That, of course, could lead to more upgrades, which could lead to more e-waste, and so on and so on.