Leonard Palmer

Designer.Researcher.Maker.

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A School with Room for Queerness
Pipecycle_Design
Data Pub(lic)
Slope House
Inside Out
Monoliths
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Confession

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Pipecycle_Experiment
Feel the Flux
Moss*Crete
Shells of Light, Blobs of Shadow

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woodles.n.things
Zero Waste Cart
Japanese Boat Building Workshop


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Feel the Flux

Conductive experience

Fall 2024
Grinham Research Group
Harvard GSD+SEAS

Team: Leonard Palmer, Jonathan Grinham
Feel the Flux is an immersive, interactive thermal experience that showcases the sun’s limitless energy. The installation features a field of freestanding solar collector panels, each fitted with hydronic pipes with a high-emissivity coating to capture and concentrate solar heat. At dawn, as sunlight touches the panels, an integrated photovoltaic cell powers a small pump, circulating a water-glycol solution through the pipes. Visitors can adjust these free-rotating panels to follow the sun, warming the water as it moves into an insulated foam sphere. By gripping the exposed pipes in the sphere, visitors “feel the flux”—the sun’s warming energy in their hands. Beyond its exhibit life, Feel the Flux envisions new urban applications. The panels could serve as warming stations during winter or, with a heat-rejecting sky-cooling coating, as cooling stations in summer. By transforming our passive relationship with solar energy into a tactile, interactive experience, Feel the Flux invites visitors to feel freely available solar energy as both playful and sustaining. 

Each panel is a free-standing, free-rotating solar collector.
Water-glycol solution travels through the pipes arrayed on the front of the panel, into the insulated sphere where they can grip the exposed portion of the pipe to feel the heat collected from the sun.
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