Chrysalia

Discipline : Product : People's Choice Award

Categories : Other Categories — Product / Open Category in Product : Grand Winner

Chrysalia is an urn that reimagines the funeral ritual. Designed to offer a final tribute through a participatory gesture of farewell, it transforms the ceremony, through design, into a sensitive, unifying and symbolic experience. At the crossroads of object design, experience design, scenography and anthropology, Chrysalia offers a new way of inhabiting the final farewell: not as a fixed moment around the loved one, but as a collective movement of love.

Inspired by the chrysalis — a symbol of passage and metamorphosis — the urn becomes the heart of a participatory ritual. During the ceremony, loved ones are invited to place a pearl around the urn, symbolically carrying a thought, a memory or a tribute. Gradually, these assembled pearls form a chrysalis: a cocoon of memory woven by those who remain, around the person they love.

The ritual continues as the urn is detached from the cocoon of pearls, evoking passage and transformation, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. To close the farewell ritual, a flame is placed at the centre of the chrysalis, revealing a constellation of light through the pearls.

Through its design, Chrysalia shifts the traditional function of the funeral urn. The object, often perceived as a still and silent container, becomes a space for encounter and transmission. Through the collective movement it generates, the urn comes to life and gives rise to a human choreography around the loved one. It becomes the centre of a gathering, bearing witness to a shared humanity standing together in the face of death.

The innovation and boldness of Chrysalia lie in the meeting of form, use and emotion. Here, design is not limited to a consoling aesthetic; it structures an experience in which object, space and gesture respond to the anthropological needs of farewell.

In a context where collective rituals have become impoverished or standardized, Chrysalia opens an avant-garde path: one in which design can restore collective presence, make love visible and give material form to memory. The project responds to a universal need — to remember, to connect, to accompany a passage — while proposing a new form, adaptable to the cultural, spiritual or secular sensitivities of families.

Created by the studio Galena in Aurum, founded by Gaëtan Havart, designer-architect, and Violaine Camal, palliative care nurse, Chrysalia was born from the alliance between creation and care. This dual expertise gives the project its precision and depth: a formal and scenographic rigour placed at the service of the emotions and human needs that surround farewell.

Chrysalia testifies to the ability of design to intervene at the heart of death and life. By transforming an urn into a living experience, it offers a contemporary, sensitive and necessary response to one of the most universal moments of human existence.

The project in images