French industrial designer Mathieu Lehanneur’s inventive pharmaceuticals in MoMA’s new show, introduce ritual and art into medicine.

Every Sunday, a youngish friend of mine, who recently suffered a heart attack, puts a week’s worth of pills into his seven-day dispenser. For each day there is a big yellowy-pink oval vitamin pill, an orange Plavix, a specially-coated aspirin and, lastly, a quarter of a Bisoprolol, divided by a mechanism that looks like a tiny paper-cutter. After he takes his four morning pills, he puts one cholesterol-reducing Lipitor pill into the newly-empty compartment, to take at seven in the evening. This he often forgets to do.

“It’s a little like being in prison and scratching each passing day into your cell wall,” my friend says. “It makes time move in a very concrete way, but it’s sheer drudgery.”

French industrial designer Mathieu Lehanneur’s new “products” use design to address basic attitudes about medication. His Therapeutic Objects, in New York’s MoMA’s autumn exhibition, SAFE: Design Takes on Risk, showcase his medicative devices that were created to heal and palliate psychologically as well as chemically. He believes that the forms and ways medicine is taken ignore the psychology of the patient.

At one time or another, most people will need daily medication. For some, it’s an occasional weeklong regimen of antibiotics, with painkillers and decongestants thrown in throughout the day. For others, it may be a permanent treatment—a diabetic’s morning insulin shot, an asthmatic’s inhalant , an HIV-positive person’s antiretroviral cocktail. Whatever form it takes, medicating oneself has inevitable side effects: We become addicted to the pills. We don’t believe in the pills. We submit to them. We rebel against them. We forget to take them.

Lehanneur’s Antibiotics in Layers is a large ‘onion’ of multi-colored antibiotic papers that the patient tears off one-by-one and ingests. When the onion disappears, the treatment is over and an opaque healing process has been transformed into something definite and tangible. “It works a little like an advent calendar,” says Lehanneur. “It’s a strategy for making time go by more quickly.”

“When I first began working on this project,” he says, “I felt that medication was something that had not been properly thought through, and that it is the key in a very complex relationship. Doctors typically classify treatments in terms of the nature of the illness—is it chronic, acute, terminal? Is it healable?—rather than in terms of different kinds of patient behaviors. I spent some time observing the behavior of ill people and came up with a set of classifications that I believe all patients fall into: those who are dealing with imagined illnesses; those who fight against their illness and want to drive it out of their bodies; others who co-exist with their illnesses; and, finally, patients who refuse to believe they are ill. So patient behavior was the starting point of my project, not the illnesses themselves.” The antibiotic onion was designed for patients who have a conflictional relationship with their illness. For these patients, Lehanneur also designed Medicine by the Centimeter, a string of individual dosages of inhaleable estrogen whose length is determined by the duration of the treatment prescribed. It looks like a set of pharmaceutical rosary beads—a reference that is not accidental.

To Lehanneur, ritual is the forgotten component in modern medicine. In his notes, he comments on the disappearance of “healers and apothecaries [who] took with them the mystery and magic of healing illnesses,” and later remarked that “via the doctor’s prescription, medication is close to the Catholic Eucharist.” While many of his devices make drugs more comprehensible, others emphasize the unquantifiable comfort of ritual. Designed to assist insomniacs, Sleep Wand belongs to Lehanneur’s imaginary illness category. Sufferers place a clear wand in a glass of water, stir for five minutes until the wand dissolves, and then drink the solution. The wand, however, is a placebo; the ritual stirring and waiting induces drowsiness Lehanneur believes.

Lehanneur is a graduate of Paris’s Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle. While there, he earned pocket money by acting as a guinea pig for pharmaceutical labs, where he first got the idea of designing medicative devices. “During those testing procedures,” he remembers, “I would be given the medicine, and then a team of doctors and nurses would come and look at me. The testing was always governed by a very strict protocol. It was like Catholic mass. And I realized that whatever the medication was, it already had an effect simply because there was this protocol in place. And then I thought about somebody who is alone, at home, taking his medicine, without the protocol, without the doctors and nurses administering it to him and examining him, and how less effective medicine is in that kind of context. I read a study that said that 50 percent of the time, medication is not properly taken. People take it irregularly, or they take too much of it, or they don’t believe in it and stop taking it too early.” Medicine is taken in isolation with little follow-up. Lehanneur believes that medication can be designed in such a way that it evokes some of the shamanistic ceremony we have lost along the way.

Besides the performative aspect that is designed into many of his devices, Lehanneur has created medicines that illustrate an illness’ effects based on a 16th century doctrine in which the form and appearance of a medicine dictates its healing properties. Third Lung is a device designed for patients in the refusal category. It prods asthmatic sufferers into taking their medicine by creating a physical symbiotic relationship between patient and medicine. The ‘lung’ is a flat box with flexible elastomer skin. Throughout the night, it slowly fills with asthmatic spray; by morning, the box is swollen and distended. The asthma sufferer ‘relieves’ the lung by sucking in the air and medication.

Lehanneur has shown his prototypes to pharmaceutical labs, but there are no takers yet. “Intellectually, they were very interested but they were concerned that people would think they were toys,” he says. And, it is true, some of his objects, like the Therapeutic Handkerchief, a product aimed at hayfever sufferers that has a little pocket for nasal spray, could be described as whimsical. Playful is the last thing that pharmaceutical companies want their drugs to be. Except for some anti-depressants like Venlafxine which are controversially marketed in cheerful colors and friendly shapes, medication tends to be disagreeable, as proof of its effectiveness. Why else the unpronounceable names, bitter flavors and somber colors? There is the sense that taking medicine must not be an entirely pleasant experience. Deep down, we expect our pills – and not just the proverbial ones—to be hard and bitter to swallow. In fact, the Greek word pharmakon means both remedy and poison—what heals can also kill. Lehanneur tells the story of an asthmatic spray which didn’t have the usual bitter aftertaste. “People brought the spray back to the doctor and asked for the old one back, because they couldn’t tell whether it was working or not. The bad taste had a function.”

Lehanneur is alert to the strange repulsion factor in drugs and protective of the mystery at the heart of medical practice. We do not want our medicines to be too appealing; neither do we want them to be too understandable. Deliberate obfuscation is what Lehanneur thinks is at work in the physician’s indecipherable Rx—the scrawl that ‘recreates the magic inherent in prescription.” His paper prescription bag starts out as a typical Rx form. When it’s filled, the form folds into a handy paper bag, perforated “to keep the confidentiality of the prescription, so that people can no longer read which medicines were prescribed.’ By alluding to the arcane spells and magic potions that medical prescriptions originated from as well as the quasi-religious rituals, symbols and shamans that once characterized medicine, Lehanneur is guaranteeing that his devices will not be popular with medical and pharmaceutical establishments. His objects ask us to think beyond syrups, pills and capsules. They remind us that ultimately the patient has just as much control over the healing process as any medication.