A marriage of engineering and design
Founders of FiveCo and Pilot Design, they are combining their expertise to create beautiful innovative objects, including this clock-sculpture
Jean-Marc Corset
They have been recognised for years for their collaborative work on projects for major international brands. Antoine Lorotte, engineer and founder of FiveCo in Mont-sur-Lausanne, and Philippe Vallat, the designer who created Pilot Design in Vevey, are joining forces to launch their own brand. Around Five, which aims to design beautiful innovative objects, is currently running a crowdfunding campaign to begin production of a first series: a "sculpture of time" clock that reflects the solar trajectory.
This unusual Swiss-made table clock draws inspiration from the great stone sundials, reimagining time through "the path of the sun and its curved lines that appear and disappear behind the horizon. The scrolling of digital seconds is replaced by a poetic sense of time," note the creators of this aluminium piece, priced at CHF 1,210 (CHF 890 during the crowdfunding campaign). The time is indicated with a precision of approximately two seconds per day, thanks to the linear movement of a marker across twenty-four hours, starting and returning at 6:00. Fitted with a small stepper motor, the A5-01 clock runs on batteries.
Around Five has already raised more than half of its CHF 89,000 target, and the production network is already operational. This first object under the new brand recalls various achievements by FiveCo, a company founded in Lausanne in 2002 by five EPFL graduates in microtechnology.
In their early days, they created the autonomous RoboX robots used at Expo.02 in Neuchâtel to serve as multilingual guides for visitors. They also made a name for themselves with high-end watch display cases that cause the valuable object to disappear as a hand approaches. It is this same engineering firm, specialising in mechatronics and microcontroller-based systems with embedded intelligence — not to mention image-processing algorithms — that designed a modern collection of furniture with secret drawers. Also to its credit is the now famous exceptional cigar box, priced at one million francs, packed with technology featuring 71 printed circuit boards and automatically managing humidity and temperature, as well as an online wine cellar management system.
But its high-tech achievements for major international industrial groups — not always publicly disclosed — are also of greater significance. For example, in the field of embedded intelligence for electric vehicles, FiveCo developed a battery management system that controls the charge of each of the 672 individual cells, optimising the available energy in Nissan hybrid racing cars.
