If you’ve ever visited Inovateus’ South Bend, Indiana headquarters (and we hope you will!), you’ll notice there are many solar-themed posters on the wall. These aren’t your typical commercial or utility-scale solar project posters, although we have those too. These are different.
As you can see, all of these examples are bright, fun and often “punny” illustrations that solarize some object or activity, but there’s more behind these designs than just the creative whimsy from our Inovateus marketing department.
Inspiring people is part of the Inovateus mission of Building a Brilliant Tomorrow, so we wanted to have a visual way to motivate ourselves when we walked into the office every morning. After some discussion, we eventually came up with the idea of making some creative solar posters for each team member. They would remind us of three things:
First, the solar business isn’t just a job, it can also be fun. That’s why we love going on team trips to root for the Cubbies in the playoffs (finally!), supporting IndyCar driver Stefan Wilson and competing at Solar Battle of the Bands. While we can’t do those activities every day and put panels on the ground, solar posters like these can help everyone at Inovateus see the playful side of the solar business.
Second, we all came to Inovateus with a personal life. That’s why you’ll see many team member hobbies represented, from bowling to golf to music. As much as we want our team to be dedicated to solar, we also want them to have their personal time with their families, friends and nonsolar activities. Between the text and the visual element, these posters often reflect the personalities and goals of our team members.
An example is the solarized grand piano that was designed for my office. Playing on grand pianos has been a part of my life since I was a teenager, but this photo also symbolizes my grand ideas for Inovateus spreading solar throughout the world.
Third, we wanted these posters to represent our belief that we can help bring solar energy to many of the things that humans do in the world. For example, we designed and built an off-grid solar desalination plant for the CuisinArt Resort on the island of Anguilla. A lot of people told us it would be extremely difficult—and they were right. However, our passion for replacing the island’s unreliable, expensive and polluting diesel generators with clean solar energy encouraged our partners and solar engineers to overcome those challenges, making this “impossible” solar-powered desalination plant a reality.
So maybe we can’t truly solarize a piano, but we can put solar on the roof of a concert hall. And maybe we can’t solarize a Millennium Falcon spacecraft due to current laws of physics, space and time. Fine. But we can dream about it when we’re designing solar carports for MSU. And then maybe, just maybe, if MSU engineering students see our Millennium Falcon solar poster someday, they’ll find the way to build a solar-powered spaceship that’s even cooler than the Millennium Falcon.
That’s why we’ve decided to share these solar posters outside of our Inovateus office walls. Starting today and every Thursday, we’ll be publishing one solar poster a week on our social media channels. We welcome you to download them and put them on your own office walls, or perhaps put them on the walls of your children.
To download each poster, just follow @InovateusSolar on Twitter, on LinkedIn or like our page on Facebook. Every Thursday, we’ll publish one poster with a little background of who and what generated the idea. We hope you enjoy them and that they inspire you every day as much as they inspire all of us.
By TJ Kanczuzewski, president of Inovateus Solar
