Jean-Louis Frechin

How was the Frechin Lamp created?

Jean-Louis Frechin —The first person to come see us was Frederic Winkler, and there was a meeting, an understanding of what we were doing and what we wanted to do. The story of this lamp was born like that.

What does the Frechin Lamp represent?

JLF — I've always tried to bring design into the digital realm, to use objects as interfaces; that's really what makes me unique. Lights, lamps, are ultimately interfaces that allow us to experience the night and evolve with us during the day. Lamps perfectly illustrate how we try to create new objects, with behaviors, emotions, poetry, and animated by technologies that disappear to create wonder. By working with light differently, by modifying the initial beam, we've done research to try to transform our perception of light and transform these LEDs we all know into something more magical, more mysterious, to create a new object whose nature we don't know—whether it's a tube, a lamp, a scientific instrument, or a purely poetic, useless device.

Could you describe this interface for us?

JLF — The idea was to create an object that embodies a kind of history and modernity, and above all, magic and poetry. Most of the objects No Design creates are interfaces, things that are manipulated, and it seemed interesting to me, in the Frechin Lamp, to illustrate what we love, which is to make the object an interface and a tool that can be manipulated. For that, you have to be able to pick it up, grasp it, and create this connector that allows energy and light to flow into the tube. So it's an object that can be manipulated, whose design you can almost choose; that is to say, you are co-responsible for how the lamp is positioned.

One last word…

JLF — Breaking the rules, not being in silos, but being elsewhere, and that's what we tried to do. In fact, taking elements from cultures that aren't part of traditional cultures and turning them into objects, and ultimately these objects speak to people. Everyone can see a bit of science in them—ancient science, new science, magic, a ray of light—and that means people adopt and take hold of the object: it means the object speaks to them. "The lamps perfectly illustrate how we try to create new objects, with behaviors, emotions, poetry, and animated by technologies that disappear to create wonder."