GENESIS OF ELECTROTRUCS

Hello, my name is Gautier Lemesle, I am a product designer and I teach design and arts and crafts at the Ecole Boulle in Paris.

For the past three years, I have been developing a way of designing small electrical appliances as part of a circular economy, by combining industrial parts from rubbish tips with noble materials that can be made using techniques available in fablabs and makerspaces.

My work lies on the borderline between industry and craft: a household appliance industry that is showing its limits and a craft industry that I am developing, offering multiple resources for shaping and reconditioning household appliances that have become obsolete. I originally worked with repairers as part of my diploma project at ESDMAA in Yzeure, France. I noticed a lot of small household appliances that were still in good working order, but that were still ending up in landfill sites.

Today, more than repairing, the crucial issue is to reclaiming our electrical appliances, understand them and build them in our own way to make them last both technically and aesthetically.

EVENT VIENNA _ BREAK FAST BUT REPAIRED

The Project Excellence Award made me realise that the idea that I have been developing since I graduated working with a small repairer has come a long way and had a resonance on a European scale that I hadn’t imagined.

My aim in this Break Fast But Repaired workshop was to open up the debate around our small household appliances associated with breakfast (toasters, coffee makers and mixers) and to see if an aesthetic of customisation could find its place in the refurbishment community. The debate revealed a clash of two points of view that now seem to me to be complementary: either develop more of a repair culture for our small appliances and more widely for technical objects, or require manufacturers to design appliances that are easy to repair.

WHAT I DID AS WINNER OF THE PROJECT EXCELLENCE AWARD

Following this event in Vienna, thanks to the support of the Ars Longa team and Morning Bagnolet near Paris, I was able to organise a second event of the same type during a breakfast to assess the interest aroused by this project with a different audience. By drawing up a survey, I was able to gather a lot of useful information, particularly about the wonder of the 3D ceramic printing technique.

Following a number of fruitful discussions, I was introduced to an annual competition organised by SYCTOM FRANCE, an organisation that looks after household waste in mainland France. This Design Zero Waste 2025 edition has decided to take up the issue of the repairability of small household appliances.

Perfect for developing my project !

I’ve had the opportunity to make a lot of discoveries and meet a lot of people:

• The design duo Natacha and Sacha, who form a global design studio founded in Paris in 2018, carrying out projects at the interface of industrial design, furniture, service design and architecture.
• Olivier Leduc (Managing Director) of RepareSeb, a reconditioning joint venture created in 2021, the result of a collaboration between an association that provides its social support (Le Groupe Ares) and a private company that provides its expertise (Le Groupe SEB).
• Laurène Cuénot (Director of Environmental Performance) from Ecosystem, a company with a mission since 2021, whose actions are guided by one objective: to extend the lifespan of electrical and electronic equipment.
• Nesrine Dani (Director of Envie leLabo & Partenariat innovation) from the Envie network, which trains and supports people into sustainable employment through activities involving the re-use, repair and sale of household appliances and medical technical aids, as well as the processing of electrical and electronic waste.
• Marius (Sales Outbound and Artisan Relations) from Wecandoo, a company that supports the craft industry by organising manual workshops where artisans and private individuals come together to share a passion and practice a skill.
• Dorothée (Founder of Ceramicafé Geneviève) a group of cafés offering introductory workshops in painting and decorating ceramics. Our discussion opened the door for me to print multiple ceramic objects for participatory colouring events, while waiting to customise your own small appliances during a workshop.

As part of this competition, I presented a workshop for making reconditioned household appliances using printed and decorated ceramics. While we wait to see the winning results of this competition, I have two convictions: Ceramic 3D printing intrigues many people because of its spectacular aspect and its adaptability to a wide range of contexts. The link with industry is still complex, and the future of this project lies in its educational scope and in developing imaginations through workshops where we make things together.

Thanks to the competition prize, I was able to explore how to develop these small ceramic appliances on a European scale. In particular, I was able to go to the Saint Etienne Biennial to discover related projects with potential for collaboration, such as Zixuan Zhou’s “ANTI Throw-Away Mentality”, based in Germany, and Nicolas Hervé’s “Mixeur en céramique”, based in Paris.

OBJECTIVE & OUTLOOK

I can’t wait to find out the results of the SYCTOM competition on 19 June, to see which solutions the competition partners liked best. I hope that there will be a craze for this new way of treating small electrical appliances, of ennobling them rather than throwing them away.

At the same time, thanks to the competition prize, I’m continuing to develop the delta ceramic printer developed by JetClay, which I discovered at Design Week in Vienna, by looking for subcontractors close to the Morning workshop. The idea is to improve the quality of printed household appliance prototypes, both in terms of printing and decoration, so that I can be more convincing about the benefits of making them more desirable and taking better care of them. As soon as my designs are more convincing and functional, I want to continue this project with the development of an open source tool for designing our household appliances that can be distributed !