What if, for once, we started with the switch?

Switches and sockets usually come at the end of a project. After the walls, the floors, the furniture, the lighting… in short, when everything has already been decided.
Vincent Baranger et Anthony Lebossé from Studio 5.5 chose to look at things differently.
True to their practice of repurposing everyday objects, they drew on Schneider Electric’s Odace range to create Volt Face, a collection of lighting fixtures and furniture in which sockets and switches no longer come at the end of a project: they are where it begins. And so came the wall light, table, bedside table, pendant light and surprising lamps designed to invite interaction.
The switch is no longer the final punctuation mark of a project. It becomes its vocabulary and raw material.
Usually, the switch controls the light. Here, it gives the light a physical presence, becomes part of the object itself, and reveals the richness of the materials, colours and finishes of these products.

A material you can touch

It is one of the most familiar technical objects in our everyday lives. We touch it thousands of times, recognise it by feel, operate it almost unconsciously and, generally, give it no more thought than we do a door handle. But Volt Face decides to give it a little more consideration.
These objects are also a playful invitation to interact, to touch the switches and activate them.
“We wanted to encourage people to try them, to make them want to touch them, to make them wonder whether everything is actually functional, whether it works when you press this one.”
The gesture becomes an integral part of the project. And so does the famous “click.”
A material that we look at, touch and hear.

From Catalogue to Project

Volt Face also invites us to look at an industrial range in a different way.
A catalogue is usually designed to help us choose: this reference rather than that one, white rather than black, round rather than square.
Here, we are no longer simply choosing products. We are composing with them.
The Odace range becomes a toolbox. Each socket, each switch becomes a building block that designers and interior architects can play with, repeat, combine and build upon.
An industrial range is not an end in itself. It is a vocabulary.