Le Visionnaire Heritage and Innovation Center
Using machine learning to turn 100 years of history into future inspiration.
Overview
L'Oréal's headquarters at 14 Rue Royale is a monument to history, but the company also needed a space dedicated to the future. They asked us to transform their original 1938 birthplace into a cutting-edge creative hub for their global workforce. The challenge was "data overload"—L'Oréal has so much history and market data that creative teams often felt paralyzed rather than inspired. We designed Le Visionnaire as a filter for the noise: an experience that uses machine learning to curate the company’s massive archive, allowing employees to pull specific threads of inspiration from the past to weave the strategy of the future.
Partners
Moatti & Rivière
Services
Experience Design, Media Design & Production, Software Design & Production
"One of the risks at L'Oréal is that we have so much information that you can easily get lost. So we created a smart selection of relevant content that can help newcomers to go deeper into its culture and history. Nothing is just decorative. We wanted to give meaning to everything; everything has a function.”
The Details
We designed the experience to bridge the gap between the tactile and the digital. In La Route, we built a physical cabinet of curiosities—illuminated drawers and niches that invite employees to physically handle the company’s heritage, from vintage hair dye to early sunscreen. This leads to the Visionary Wall, a massive AI-driven canvas that can sort millions of images not just by keyword, but by visual composition—grouping them by color, shape, and pattern. This allows designers to build instant, visual mood boards that can be saved to their employee badge and exported directly to their desk.
