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There is an energy in modern life that most of us never notice, living in the walls of kitchens, that comes from televisions that stay on standby, routers that never sleep, and microwave ovens with flashing clocks. We call it “ghost” or “vampire energy,” a scary name for standby power. It accounts for somewhere between 5% and 10% of household electricity worldwide, releasing about 44 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually.
A team of designers at Samsung Design registration academy – Jungmin Park, Everywhere Ko, and Minhy Kim – decided to tackle this problem by reframing it in a project called SPOA. It’s a conceptual circular energy system based on a simple question: what if we started collecting ghost energy instead of letting it escape?
SPOA © Jungmin Park, Yoonseo Ko and Minhee Kim
SPOA Stem © Jungmin Park, Yoonseo Ko and Minhee Kim
SPOA © Jungmin Park, Yoonseo Ko and Minhee Kim
SPOA Slim © Jungmin Park, Yoonseo Ko and Minhee Kim
Design process © Jungmin Park, Yoonseo Ko and Minhee Kim
Original model © Jungmin Park, Yoonseo Ko and Minhee Kim
The mushroom analogy © Jungmin Park, Yoonseo Ko and Minhee Kim
SPOA captures electromagnetic fields (EMF) recorded by standby devices and converts them into reusable power. The project goes beyond a simple performance fix to a paradigm shift, transforming the home from a place of consumption to what they call a “self-sustaining energy ecosystem.” The idea is based on rapidly advancing scientific research: collecting ambient electromagnetic waves has been an area of interest for more than a decade, with scientists investigating how to record these low-level frequencies.
The product takes this body of research and frames it into a plan for the home. While each individual phantom device wastes very little energy on its own, with an average of 63 devices per household, the cumulative effect is huge. SPOA suggests three small products that act as EMF receptors and then as reusable batteries. The Cap is a compact portable version, the Slim is designed to attach to surfaces like the side of a refrigerator, and the Stem is a tabletop version built with enhanced wave detection.
What makes the work interesting is also its social context, which is explicitly concerned with identity and how we think about ourselves in relation to energy. SPOA is part of the world of energy producers, a concept that defines a hybrid between a consumer and a producer that has gained significant traction as decentralized energy systems become increasingly popular and necessary. While the most familiar shopper product is the solar panel, SPOA imagines a more intimate, atmospheric version of the same transition.
In the aesthetics of SPOA, the designers connected the product with another strange concept: the mushroom. Anyone who has spent time in recent years following the design dialogue will recognize the reference as a mycelium analogy, the idea of a distributed, decentralized network of connections that quietly process waste into something useful. It has become one of the most resonant metaphors in sustainable design and the circular economy, starting with Anna Tsing’s 2015 book “The mushroom at the end of the world”.
It is worth noting that the project is a student design concept and, unfortunately, is far from a commercially available product. The question of how much usable energy such a device could actually harvest is still unclear. Phantom power is a real and significant problem, but its root cause is device design, and critics of ambient-contemplation approaches argue that they risk normalizing inefficiency. Other solutions include the One Watt Initiative, which stipulated that devices could not consume more than one watt in standby mode. This type of solution would be optimal for solving the problem, but would render products like SPOA useless.
They don’t need strong design ideas to solve every problem they touch, they need to ask better questions about the industry. Reframing waste of resources it is at the heart of what the circular economy is all about, a paradigm shift that both designers and consumers need to make. SPOA he imagines a different outcome for this wasted energy, and in doing so, he imagines a different kind of house and a different kind of person living in it.
