The Work I Am Most Proud Of
French designer Matthieu Lehanneur reveals out of the thousands of projects he’s worked on, which one he is most proud of…
By Harper’s Bazaar Singapore Team - published
“My favourite project was when I worked with a palliative care department in France and did Tomorrow Is Another Day. I was commissioned by the head of service to design something. The department is advanced in terms of technology and expertise, but they wanted something in the room. So I connected the patients to the future by placing a screen in their room which would show them the weather for the next day anywhere in the world. They could see clouds, blue skies, rain… and they could only decide the location. The device was continuously connected to the weather forecast. All that data, video animation…
I’m proud of it for different reasons. I’ve always wanted to make people who are very far away from the design field think that maybe a designer can help them in their field. And for the commission I am proud. It is a way to be really useful to the family and the patient. When someone is terminally ill, it is hard to find the right topic to discuss. I wanted to bring this tiny part of life into the room. We are always talking about the future and our surroundings (the weather). In fact, time and weather in French is the same word, “temps.”
The project was very complex in terms of technology. There is the algorithm process transforming it, there are videos… And I wanted to avoid a loop like a TV news channel. The sky would never be the same—that would be horrible. But I didn’t want to show the workings. At the end it just needed to appear on a simple screen. It took four weeks to do the brief and three or four years to produce.
The department head contacted me recently to say that there was a woman from West Africa staying at the hospital and she wanted to modify the sky every day. They asked her why she wanted to change it so frequently and she explained her son was a pilot and she could follow him. She could also text him the weather for the next day, and say, “Be careful when you arrive in Amsterdam as it’s going to be stormy.” She had something to talk to him about even though she was far away.
I could never have thought of that when I produced the product. She took it to another level.
Like the Audemars Piguet project, it was another way to bring nature into an indoor space without losing its energy.” ■
