For Mathilde Wittock, design cannot be summed up as either form or function: it is a lever for transformation and a language capable of questioning our relationship with life. After graduating from Central Saint Martins in London, she took an interest in industrial design before making a U-turn. “We were asked to reinvent existing objects to make them more competitive and efficient, but that made no sense.” Very early on, she asked herself questions about the origins of materials, their traceability and real impact. The text “I, Pencil”, in which a simple pencil describes its own production made her aware of the political significance of objects and the need to return to the start of the production chain to grasp what is at stake.

This attention to the story behind a material led to wider reflection about our perceptions, and the way in which design engages all the senses – just like sound, which became central to her activity. In June 2020, as part of her training in industrial design, she developed the Soundbounce project, transforming used tennis balls into acoustic modules. It was based on a double intention: giving a second life to an object with high environmental stakes (over 400 million tennis balls are produced each year, less than 1% are recycled), and questioning the macroscopic impact of sound, especially its effects on human health and ecosystems. Cut into pieces and reassembled locally thanks to digital machines, tennis balls become a tactile material, colourful and customizable. While studying for her Master’s degree in bio-design, she continued her research in sound, this time on a microscopic scale with Soundroot, a living material based on vegetable roots stimulated by sound frequencies. Presented as a poetic and sensory response to the way in which sound influences life, this modular material makes the impact of sound on material visible. A form of exploration that she pursues today in her studio, experimenting with new leads based on the skin of fruit, fibres or roots: all ways of reconnecting the human being with life.