Now more than ever, the designer’s role is to facilitate paradigm shifts: by raising awareness of and foreseeing the potential for change, and by integrat- ing these new concepts into our daily life. In this way, we need to re-engineer the way we generate, store, transmit and use energy. Today we are dependent on energy, but tomorrow energy could become an ally in our everyday life. By using smart materials and mini-generators in our routine activities, we could produce energy throughout the day for immediate local consumption by goods that are highly energy efficient.

Welcome to the era of nano-energy.
And, welcome to the era of inventing everyday scenarios: le nano-ordinaire 1.

By way of explaining this paradigm shift, let’s consider a simple example. Whereas last night we might have used an energy consuming electric blanket to keep us warm, in the near future, a blanket of phased heat conductive fibres will, by contrast, conserve our body heat during the night for use the next day. Thus, we shift from the status of a consumer to that of a generator or supplier of energy. We therefore need to fundamentally re-engineer the way in which
we relate to our own bodies (we will relearn ways of battling against the cold using our own weapons and will discover their related sensations). The way
in which we perceive the objects around us will also undergo a similar transfor- mation as we assimilate them and experience new and intimate interactions with them. Nano-ordinaire seeks to explore these new scenarios of our collabo- ration with nano-energy through the routine activities of a typical day in the Empathic house.

the Empathic house and its scenarios of daiLy Life
The wall panels of the Empathic house are covered with a breathable skin:
a thin layer of osmotic film that allows a one-way flow from the interior to the exterior. The house is designed to provide a comfortable standard of living
in all climatic conditions. Its revolving wall panels contain a phased conductive material, which liquefies as the temperature rises during the day and solidifies as the temperature cools in the evening, releasing heat. As the heat is released at night I can dry my clothes on one of the wall panels.  

with Paul-Louis Meunier