The information age is helping designers nourish their creativity in new, inspired ways, writes Craig Jacobs
Imagine you are in the not-so-distant future, where the rhino has gone the route of the quagga and cars glide in mid-air thanks to floatation technology. Electronic file-sharing has become even more commonplace, marking the death of the fax machine, but what happens if you need to send something a bit more tangible to someone on the other side of the planet?
How easy would it be to simply walk outside and open up a yellow metal capsule, place inside it the teddy bear your niece left behind on a visit a few days earlier, close it, capture the recipient's details electronically and settle the cost of postage by debit card? The object "magically" arrives at its destination, with your niece, or perhaps her mother, informed by SMS that the bear can be collected. The process blends internet-based exchange and transactional technology while reducing the use of consumption.
Called Teleportissimo, this futuristic delivery service was designed by Mathieu Lehanneur (pictured) as a commission from the French postal service. It reflects the Paris-based designer's exploration of what is being called science-inspired design.
"Design is important to provide some tools to improve the living condition," he says, via a Skype chat from his Paris studio, in explaining what drives him to create.
"Design can improve my way of living, my way of sleeping, my way of breathing, my way of thinking, of loving (why not?)."
A rising star of global design, 37-year-old Lehanneur has garn ered awards including the 2006 Grand Prix de la Création from the City of Paris; a 2008 Best Innovation Award (US) for his air-filtration system Andrea; and the 2010 Intelligence de la main prize from the Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation for his series of ceramic jars entitled L'âge du Monde (The Age of the World), which were commissioned by Japanese label Issey Miyake for their flagship store in Paris and which take cold population statistics and make them aesthetically warm.
This week he will be one of the speakers at the Design Indaba in Cape Town, discussing his work, which dissects the intersections between design and the human body, biology and statistics.
Lehanneur says the information age - and our unprecedented access to a cornucopia of knowledge - is enabling designers to nourish their creativity in new ways.
"This is a new period of design. Today, it is easy to get scientific information about human beings and it is easy for me to make contact with particular specialists, whether it is regarding the brain or sleeping diseases.
"We are at a special period in the world, where all the information is available. This is amazing food for designers to gather this information to create a new approach."
His award-winning Andrea is a case in point - a Nasa study had found that astronauts returning from space had a high level of toxic compounds in their bodies, perhaps because spacecraft are largely made from plastic, fibreglass, insulating materials and fire retardants, which were slowly poisoning them.
"I also read somewhere that indoor pollution is more toxic than outdoor pollution," Lehanneur says.
A wooden table, for instance, emits pentachlorophenol from its fungicides, paint releases trichloroethylene, and we are exposed to formaldehyde (listed as a carcinogen by the World Health Organisation) by countless sources from domestic cleaning products to plastic furniture.
"My idea was to use nature for what it does to clean the air to help make it healthier and allow us to live longer," Lehanneur explains. The result was Andrea, a living air filter which uses plants selected for their abilities to purify the air through their leaves and roots.
"Aesthetics is so important for such an object - when you design an object to help your breathing, you must be able to feel if your indoor air is polluted or clean.
"For Andrea, my idea was to show the plant as though it is the brain in the head - I wanted the object to be displayed next to your desk or in your lounge, where it is close to you, almost so you could touch it as though you would touch the head of your dog."
Another household appliance in the Lehanneur world is Local River, a home-storage unit for fish and vegetables, which was inspired by locavores, a group that appeared in San Francisco in 2005 and the members of which eat only foods produced within a radius of 160km.
"It is a kind of a fridge - a mix between an aquarium and a garden to produce food - [which allows me to] get my own food and produce it for myself and not in my garden but my living room.
"The idea is not to bring nature home only as decoration but to use nature for what it is able to do.
"Nature can provide us with food."
Spirituality and meditative reflection is found in his Demain est un Autre Jour (Tomorrow is Another Day), a work commissioned by the palliative care unit at the Diaconesses/Croix-Saint-Simon Hospital Group in Paris. Dome-shaped screens that mimic cloud formations, it uses weather information from the internet to create an image of a changing sky.
"The average time of the patients in the palliative-care department is only 10 to 15 days - their last 10 to 15 days - and they wanted something that would help improve the last days of a patient, improve the relationship between the patients and their family in a meditative way," he explains.
To make his point, Lehanneur reminds me that we started our Skype chat talking about the weather - I mentioned that it was an unseasonably wet day in Joburg, while he was relishing the sun in Paris.
"You know the weather is a good topic to start a conversation - all people who live talk about the weather."
The Design Indaba conference takes place at the Cape Town Convention Centre from February 29 until March 2. For more details, go to www.designindaba.com
