EDF Pulse Design is already imagining the future of energy

Actus#energieReading time: 08'34''December 6, 2021Guillaume Foissac, head of EDF Pulse Design (©EDF Pulse)While joining the brand new innovation department, the EDF Pulse Design team, has established itself within EDF with fruitful projects, which have caught the eye of the group's other departments. Guillaume Foissac, its manager, aims to carry out even more forward-looking projects. And, if possible, visionaries.SHARE REPORT AN ERROR SAVE PDF / EXPORT

They are less than ten this Monday, November 22 morning, distributed between the ground floor and the basement of the rectangular building of 400m², located rue Kelvin, in the middle of the giant EDF Lab Les Renardières site, in Écuelles ( Seine et Marne). Around them, a number of engineers and technicians, in far more imposing laboratories, regularly carry out tests on electrical networks, reproduce tropical climates or test the resistance of electrical pylons on which lightning strikes programmed by them. The EDF Pulse Design team is less noisy than its neighbors: it works on smaller machines, from laptops to state-of-the-art 3D printers.

“The principle of the Design Lab, which was created in 2013, was to create a simple, open space, where we all work together on projects with different perspectives and, around us, multiple resources to quickly get started. in action in order to immediately test each hypothesis", describes Guillaume Foissac, manager of the place, scanning a bright room, centered around an office island, itself surrounded by various small plastic molding machines, a digital screen and shelves strewn with design books and models of all kinds.

Arrived at EDF in 2006, it took several years for this 40-year-old to impose, project after project, his multidisciplinary vision as a designer in the face of a corporate culture that he describes as "very technical" and in an environment that was then his. "stranger", he admits today. His right-hand man, Étienne Vallet, joined him in 2008 and it was together that they set up the Design Lab five years later, within the group's R&D. “Our mission is to develop innovations that are not only based on the technological assessment of the devices, but which also seek to adapt to uses, preserve the environment and allow living together, sums up Guillaume Foissac. And this, in themes as diverse as energy poverty, electric mobility, the relationship of energy production with territories, home automation or the future of agricultural production. »

Twenty patents filed

After eight years of activity, the Design Lab has made a place for itself within the group: the department exceeded twenty people in 2019, the vast majority of whom are designers accompanied by a few engineers and developers. , “With a rather modest budget on the scale of EDF” agrees the manager of the place, his team initiates and participates in 60 to 70 projects per year. She has filed about twenty patents so far. In addition, it enjoys "good visibility, both internally and externally", welcomes Guillaume Foissac, invited the next day to Shiftlab, an annual event dedicated to design, organized at Liberté Living-Lab, a third place of innovation located in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris.

With this recognition, the Design Lab has tripled in size and is now divided into several spaces on two floors, on the ground floor and in the basement. And that's good: especially since the team has joined the innovation department of the EDF group, which wishes to place design at the heart of its strategy. "Our ambition is to show by example that a breakthrough in innovation can be a factor of commercial success", launches Guillaume Foissac.

But EDF's "M. Design" has no time to waste. He rushes to the basement, where one of his collaborators has just received a flexible high-definition touch screen, “directly from the Chinese manufacturer”. This emerging technology, "which is just beginning to equip some high-end Samsung smartphones", the EDF Pulse Design team could need it for a strategic project for the group - and therefore confidential. "You're lucky, it didn't work five minutes ago," laughs his collaborator while handling the object.

Objects at the cutting edge of technology, it is today rather in the Microfactory, just behind, that we find them. Two latest-generation photosensitive resin 3D printers (micro-stereolithography), a color multi-material 3D printer at 100,000 euros each, a set of three machines to engrave a printed circuit, melt it and install the components on it…: EDF Pulse Design can pride itself on having a high-quality manufacturing space that greatly exceeds the standards of the Fablab universe. "Today, our new objective is no longer just to manufacture prototypes, but to produce fully integrated innovations in small series in order to test them with a greater number of users," says Guillaume Foissac. It is also a way of committing to an industrial model of the future where issues of production scale and location will be fundamentally reviewed. We are the only ones at EDF to have such equipment, which is of great interest internally. This is why we are going to create an offer to make our Microfactory accessible to all group employees who wish to innovate. »

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High-tech, low-tech: each use has its own technological need

However, Guillaume Foissac insists: the work of EDF Pulse Design is not only technological. As proof, he holds up a piece of laminated paper on which there is a thermochromic ink thermometer – “like the ones you may have had when you were little to take your temperature on your forehead”, smiles the designer. This "low-cost and low-tech" system, the result of a reflection resulting from the EDF group's "Precariousness" work program, was created more than ten years ago, in collaboration with the social assistance services from the town of Melun, not far from the Les Renardières site. "Our meetings with associations had led us to an observation: people in a situation of fuel poverty very often do not know what temperature they are heating themselves at and therefore over-consume, whereas they are generally already on a very tight budget", recalls Guillaume Foissac. EDF designers then designed this small thermometer, easy to install on a door handle, which costs 10 cents to produce, and distributed it free of charge to more than a million copies in social centers in the four corners. from France. “And again last week, someone in the group sent us an e-mail to re-edit 5,000 of them,” adds the head of EDF Pulse Design.

Read alsoEDF Pulse Incubation puts intrapreneurship at the service of innovation

Behind him, on the wall of the lab's basement, is an intriguing, very open L-shaped mirror. A product that emanates from the minds of designers. "EDF, a company with a mission, had to define its raison d'être two years ago: 'Building a CO₂-neutral energy future, reconciling the preservation of the planet, well-being and development, thanks to electricity and innovative solutions and services”, reports Guillaume Foissac. We wrote all these words on a board, put them together to see what would come of it. About thirty hypotheses were generated, which finally boiled down to the idea of ​​the mirror. We have transformed this everyday object, which allows us to see ourselves as we are but also, in the collective imagination, as we would like to be, into a tool for raising awareness about our energy consumption. »

If the vertical part of the object is only a simple reflective mirror, the lower oblique part hides a screen which broadcasts environmental information (carbon emissions, air quality, etc.). But the ingenuity of this product comes from its microwave sensor, which makes it possible to "model the space to know at what distance and at what angle the individual is in order to promulgate global and fuzzy information to him when he is far and more detailed when it gets closer. All this without ever using a camera and therefore maintaining the privacy of the home intact,” explains the designer.

Self-address social and societal issues

This object, which the EDF Pulse Design team hopes to transform into a group offer, is a good illustration of another ambition that its manager has set himself since the transition to the new management: to better grasp the problems they identify, and extend its scope of exploration to all of the group's major businesses.

The best illustration of this objective requires looking through the many glass panes of the laboratory. In the distance, we can see a kind of dark slab. It's Up Data Solar, a server assembled from solar panels, vehicle batteries and smartphone processors – all end-of-life and good for recycling. “This server hosts a website, a showcase of our reflection on this installation entirely powered by solar energy and made from second-hand materials, specifies Guillaume Foissac. Due to the vagaries of the weather, the site does not always work and this is not necessarily serious, but above all it shuts down at night when no one connects to it. “The technological future does not always translate into everything connected, all the time, argues the designer in essence. The object recently attracted the curiosity of an EDF data center manager, who asked EDF Pulse Design to work on a similar model.

“Our proposition is rarely an off-the-shelf product”

While waiting to transform the testing of projects such as the mirror or Up Data Solar, Guillaume Foissac carries the great ambitions of EDF Pulse Design, which he wishes to "position on axes and key sectors that are currently virgin or that EDF does not 'not investing yet'. It is in this context that the Autonomie(s) project began in 2020, after imagining a future where individuals would dream of being self-sufficient in energy. “When you're called EDF, you could say that it's more of a risk than an opportunity, concedes Guillaume Foissac. But we can also say to ourselves that it's a step aside and that we can help this transition, to ensure that tomorrow, people are more and more autonomous and that EDF, as a distributor of energy, can provide high-performance autonomous services and systems and maintain them. »

Based on this premise, the EDF Pulse Design team opened the discussion to three other issues: power, water and data. Surrounded by academics, data experts and CNES specialists, "who know a lot about autonomy", the designers sketched out three scenarios, the most salient of which was baptized "Resilient Village", "where each household has its own specialty and produces a surplus resource and where we have created an internal network to distribute the resources fairly”, describes Guillaume Foissac.

Like this one, many EDF Pulse Design projects are presented in photos and videos, edited in the real professional studio in the basement, adjoining the Microfactory, and distributed internally and externally. “We are not going to lie to each other: our proposal is rarely an off-the-shelf product, admits Guillaume Foissac. Often, the repercussions of our work are quite indirect, but our hypotheses fuel reflection, stimulate it, to bring about an awareness that goes beyond mere economic or industrial assessments. And that is precious for a group like EDF. »

The management has understood this well, since EDF Pulse Design has been asked to participate in the major development in the future of EDF, the construction of small modular nuclear reactors (SMR), announced on November 9 by Emmanuel Macron .

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