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Kris De Decker

Following a decade long career as a science and tech journalist for Belgian media, Kris De Decker founded Low-tech Magazine when he moved to Spain in 2007.

Off-line Portal to Solar Powered Website. Built by Marie Verdeil for Arne Hendriks’ Hara Hachi Bu village at the Dutch Design Week Eindhoven, 2021. Image by Marie Verdeil. More images.
Off-line Portal to Solar Powered Website. Built by Marie Verdeil for Arne Hendriks’ Hara Hachi Bu village at the Dutch Design Week Eindhoven, 2021. Image by Marie Verdeil. More images.
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Solar Powered Website

Low-tech Magazine is an online platform that “refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution”. It underscores the potential of past and often forgotten technologies and how they can inform sustainable energy practices.

Since 2018, Low-tech Magazine runs on a self-hosted website, which is powered by a solar panel on the author’s balcony at home in Barcelona. Typical for off-the-grid renewable power systems, energy storage is limited. This means that the website goes off-line during longer periods of cloudy weather. The solar powered website was built in collaboration with designers Roel Roscam Abbing and Marie Otsuka.

The solar powered website has become a milestone in sustainable web design and received plenty of media attention (a few examples below). It has been presented at a number of exhibitions, including in the London Design Museum (“Waste age: what can design do?“, 2021) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (“Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film”, 2025). The team also received an honarary mention at Ars Electronica 2019.

More media links here.

The solar powered server. Image by Marie Verdeil.
The solar powered server. Image by Marie Verdeil.
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The Compressed Book Edition

Since 2019, Low-tech Magazine also appears in print. We have published three chronological volumes which include almost 100 articles, as well as a volume with more than 3,000 comments on those articles. The year 2022 saw the launch of a series of thematic books, five of which are now available, and the publication of a series of French books. As of April 2025, more than 10,000 books have been sold. Most copies are printed on demand.

In early 2025, Low-tech Magazine launched the “Compressed Book Edition”. Inspired by the image compression on the solar-powered website, we squeezed the article catalog of our three-volume book series into just one book. Compressing the content — an editorial and design choice — produces a much larger reduction in resource use than printing on recycled paper could ever do.

The Compressed Book Edition. Poster by Hugo Lopez.
The Compressed Book Edition. Poster by Hugo Lopez.
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The books offer the possibility to read Low-tech Magazine no matter the weather, with no access to a computer, the internet, or a power supply. A printed website also serves to preserve the content of Low-tech Magazine in the longer run. Websites don’t live forever, and the internet should not be taken for granted. The printed website is featured in the exhibition “The Ugly Duckling of the Publishing Industry? Books on Demand” at the German National Library in Leipzig.

The books were and are made in collaboration with designer Lauren Traugott-Campbell, editor Kathy Vanhout, typesetter Laia Comellas, and designer Marie Verdeil.

Prototypes and workshops

Prototypes: Bike generators

Low-tech Magazine developed eight bike generators in collaboration with designer Marie Verdeil. One of these machines forms part of the exhibition “Énergies légères” at the Pavillon d’Arsenal in Paris. Others are on display in Rotterdam, Barcelona, Essen, and Lisbon. A bike generator is not a new idea, but Low-tech Magazine saw room for improvement, especially when it comes to its practical use. The building process of the first bike generator is documented online.

Prototypes: Slow cooking devices

Low-tech Magazine designed a collection of solar powered cooking devices that run on solar panels and have in-built energy storage through thermal mass. The cooking devices were built entirely from scratch, using discarded materials found on the streets of Barcelona. The prototypes are in the process of being tested and the manual have appeared online in October 2025. This collection was built in collaboration with designers Marie Verdeil and Hugo Lopez.

Events:

The bike generators have been used at events in Barcelona, Valencia, Brussels, Lisbon, Rotterdam, Eindhoven, and Essen, powering music installations, musicians, lights, and more. Low-tech Magazine also makes a movie series showing the uses of the bike generator. See an overview of all past, current, and future events.

Pedal powered concert during the Fiesta Mayor del Clot, Barcelona, November 2023. Photo: Kris De Decker.
Pedal powered concert during the Fiesta Mayor del Clot, Barcelona, November 2023. Photo: Kris De Decker.
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Workshops

Many bike generators were built during workshops organized in Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and the Netherlands from 2023 to 2025. Participants each built a part of the bike generator. Low-tech Magazine also organizes workshops about DIY solar power, for which it also published a manual online. Workshops often happen in collaboration with designer Marie Verdeil. We also organize workshops in Barcelona with Slowlab.

Bike generator workshop in Rotterdam. Image by xxxxx.
Bike generator workshop in Rotterdam. Image by xxxxx.
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Human Power Plant

Kris De Decker collaborates with Dutch artist Melle Smets on the HUMAN POWER PLANT: an artistic research project into the possibilities of human power production in a modern society. If we generate energy ourselves, we will first and foremost ask ourselves how much energy we actually need.

Since 2017, the Human Power Plant has produced several utopian scenarios for different settings in the Netherlands:

  • The human powered student building (2017)
  • The human powered dredging colony (2018)
  • The human powered neighbourhood (2020-ongoing)
  • The human powered farm (2023)
  • The human powered steel factory (2024-25, in development).

Towards the end of 2023, the scenario “Human powered neighbourhood” made a jump to reality in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. The social housing company and the authorities granted access to a city block which can be converted to run on human power, without fossil fuels. For more details see the website of the “Huis van de Toekomst” (in Dutch).

The Human Power Plant has been exhibited twice in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2018 & 2023) in Rotterdam. The second exhibition takes the form of an interactive website about the project. It has also been on display in the Vitra Museum.

The public bathhouse in the human powered neighbourhood. Collage by Golbar Abassi.
The public bathhouse in the human powered neighbourhood. Collage by Golbar Abassi.
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Talks

Kris De Decker is a frequently requested speaker at all kinds of technology related events and conferences. These included (among others) The Conference (Malmö, Sweden), IAM (Barcelona, Spain), NODE (Frankfurt, Germany), Bits & Baüme (Berlin, Germany), Windsor Conference (Windsor, England), Crossing Border (The Hague, Netherlands), IMPAKT (Utrecht, Netherlands) and ARTMAP (Paris, France). See an overview of all talks on the events page.

Kris De Decker
at Bits & Baüme, Berlin, 2018. Image by Santiago Engelhardt.
Kris De Decker at Bits & Baüme, Berlin, 2018. Image by Santiago Engelhardt.
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Academic work

Writing

From 2016 to 2020, Kris De Decker worked together with sociologist Elizabeth Shove and her team at The Demand Centre at Lancaster University, a research project into reducing energy demand. He made the work of the scientists accessible to a wider public, both on their website and elsewhere. Several articles that came out of this collaboration have also been published on Low-tech Magazine.

Many articles that appeared on Low-tech Magazine have been cited in academic papers. Kris De Decker holds no academic degree but published two formal academic papers:

Teaching

Kris De Decker is a regular guest teacher in several design schools in Barcelona, including IED, BAU & Elisava. He also gives talks in schools and universities across Europe. Together with Jere Kuzmanic, assistant professor in urban planning, he organizes guided tours for schools and universities in Barcelona.

Podcasts

Some interviews for podcasts:

Contact

kris@lowtechmagazine.com solar@lowtechmagazine.com