Panasonic's 'Life is electric' gives batteries backstories — Cannes Design Grand Prix 2016

Panasonic wanted its many businesses — home appliances, housing, devices, energy — to feel like one brand with one promise: delivering happiness through electricity. The problem was that electricity itself is invisible, and the rechargeable battery it chose to carry the message, eneloop, had become a commodity people never think about. The battery was also about to mark its tenth anniversary.

Dentsu's creative team, led by Haruko Tsutsui, took the idea of 'giving form to invisible electricity' literally. They charged 21 identical eneloop batteries in 21 different everyday ways, always measuring the real work behind each charge: six hamsters ran wheels for 60 minutes to produce 0.34% of a charge, ten children spun a glove jungle gym for 63 minutes to reach 99.5%, and an adult shook a cocktail shaker for 33 minutes to generate 0.43%.

Each battery was then packaged to tell the story of where its electricity came from, with illustrations of the hamster wheel, the playground or the shaker. The cells were gathered into an 'electricity catalog' and shown in exhibitions at Classca and Tsutaya Electronics, while film of the charging process ran as a web movie. Identical batteries suddenly became distinct characters, each with its own amount of energy and its own origin story.

The idea's clarity carried it across borders: in June 2016 it took the Design Grand Prix at Cannes Lions, the first time a Japanese entry had won that category. Jury president Tristan Macherel called it a work that 'changed the perception of a product that has become a commodity' and 'made a statement for the industry' — design used not to decorate, but to make people reconsider the electricity they use every day.