SolShare Wins Australia's Top Good Design Award
Allume Energy's SolShare, which shares rooftop solar across apartments, is the 2026 Australian Good Design Award of the Year. Lessons for designers.
Design That Solves a Hidden Problem
SolShare, developed by Melbourne-based Allume Energy, has been named the 2026 Australian Good Design Award of the Year, announced at a ceremony in Sydney in early October. It also won the Good Design Award for Sustainability and was a joint winner of Best in Discipline for Product Design. The problem it tackles is easy to miss: apartment residents have largely been left out of rooftop solar. SolShare lets one shared rooftop system supply individual apartments directly. Great design often starts with a gap nobody else noticed.
Simple Outcome, Complex Engineering
Good Design Australia describes SolShare as a 30kVA shared solar system that can connect up to 15 apartments, directing power to where it is needed in real time. Residents keep their existing meters and energy retailers. Allume's Chief Product Officer, Stella Knorr, has said the problem was easy to describe but very hard to solve. That gap between a simple promise and complex work underneath is where good product design lives. Users should feel the simplicity; the complexity is the design team's job.
Design the Whole System, Not Just the Device
One of the most useful insights in the award write-up is Allume's view that impact comes from designing the whole system. Knorr points out that clever technology still fails to scale if it is hard to install, finance, maintain or understand. So the team considered installers, residents, housing providers, governments and building managers alongside the hardware. For any brand, that is a powerful brief. Map every person who touches your product, from whoever sells it to whoever services it, and design for all of them.
Built to Be Repaired
SolShare's major components are manufactured locally in Melbourne, and its modular design means key parts can be serviced or replaced rather than discarding the whole unit. Remote diagnostics support maintenance, and over-the-air software updates can extend what existing hardware can do. These are circular design principles in practice, not just on a sustainability slide. For product teams, repairability and updateability are no longer nice extras. They are part of how customers judge whether a brand respects them, and the planet.
Making Impact Visible
The design does not stop at the hardware. A resident portal called SolCentre shows people their solar generation, savings and environmental impact. That visibility turns an invisible box on a roof into something residents can understand and feel part of. Brands working in sustainability, health or finance can learn from this. People engage more with benefits they can see. A clear dashboard, a simple monthly summary or a friendly notification can turn an abstract value into a daily reminder of why your product matters.
Proof Through Adoption
Allume says SolShare now serves more than 13,000 apartments across Australia and the UK and has delivered more than 28 GWh of solar energy, with installations roughly doubling year on year. The product was designed with Melbourne studio Trike, and the jury praised its potential to bring solar benefits to communities that have historically missed out. Awards carry more weight when they are backed by real-world use. For founders, steady adoption is the most convincing design review of all.
Conclusion: Good Design Is Fair Design
SolShare's win is a reminder that the best design is not always the most glamorous. It is the work that quietly removes a barrier for people who have been left out, and makes the result feel simple. Systems thinking, repairability and visible benefits all played their part. At Life Designer, we see the same pattern in branding and UI projects: clarity for the end user usually comes from careful thinking about everyone behind the scenes. Design for the whole system, and fairness tends to follow.
Images: Allume Energy, courtesy of Good Design Australia; Allume Energy, courtesy of Good Design Australia. Sources: Good Design Australia, The Guardian, pv magazine Australia, ArchitectureAU.
