Jean-Louis Frechin, is a pioneer of digital design and a key player in European design.
Trained at the National School of Architecture of Paris-Villemin and at the National School of Industrial Creation (ENSCI), he taught at the Higher School of Art and Design of Amiens, and at the National Higher School of Industrial Creation (Ensci / Les Ateliers) where he founded the Digital Design Workshop and the FAbLab workshop.
Since 2001, he has headed NoDesign, a Design and Innovation Agency. He produces “neo-objects”, as he calls them himself: objects capable of producing, collecting or transmitting information, reacting to various data within the framework of industrial, cultural or research projects.

How is La Lampe Frechin born ?
JLF — Fred Winkler is the first one who’s had met us and understood what we do and what we want to do. The story of this lamp is born this way.

What does La Lampe Frechin represent ?
JLF — I have always tried to input product design in digital, making objects like an interface is my particularity. Lights and lamps are interfaces that allow us to live at night and evolve with us during the day. Lamps are the perfect illustration of how we try to create new objects, following behaviours, emotions, poetry and animated by technologies that disappear to create wonder. By working with light in a different way, by modifying the initial ray, we have 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 that we don’t know if it’s a tube, a lamp, a scientific device, a device that serves no purpose, just poetic.

Tell us about this interface.
JLF — The idea was to make an object that stay in a kind of history and modernity and mostly magic and poetry. Most of the objects conceived by NoDesign are interfaces, they are things we manipulate and it seemed interesting to me in La Lampe Frechin to illustrate what we like, which is make the object an interface or a tool we can manipulate. To do this, you have to be able to take it, grasp it and make the connector that allows energy and light to flow in the tube. It is an object you can manipulate, you can finally almost choose its design, you are co-responsible of the way the lamp is arranged.

A final world…
JLF — Break codes, don’t be in silos but being somewhere else, that is what we tried to do. In fact, take cultures that are not in a classic way to make objects out of them, these objects speak to people. Everyone can see a bit of science, old science, magic, a ray of light. It means that people adopt and grasp the object. It means the object speaks to them.