JUNG Atmosphere: Milan Design Week 2025

JUNG is a traditional German company that produces state-of- the-art building technology. The company seeks to engage with architects and planners, in particular, and Milan Design Week is an important forum for this kind of exchange. For their 2025 staging, we have created an interactive installation entitled ATMOSPHERE. A monumental sphere covered with hundreds of JUNG light switches invites visitors to interact with it. Pressing the switches changes the atmosphere in the room – creating an immersive experience of light, sound and poetry.

A ballet school in the courtyard of Via Palermo 1: We entice visitors down the stairs with a reflective banner. Here, as in the main room, light-reflecting paper curtains conceal the walls and lead guests into a space whose boundaries appear to dissolve.
In the centre of the room is a sphere fitted with hundreds of JUNG light switches that are printed with letters and graphics forming words. It doesn’t take much to identify song lyrics. And thanks to the catchy tune, the melody immediately gets stuck in your head and you begin tapping away to the rhythm.

Fittingly, our ‘JUNG UNIQUE × Ippolito Fleitz Group’ switch collection is celebrating its premiere in Milan. We invited the whole team to send us song lyrics that they associate with the theme of light. The switches are printed with these personal memories, showing that a switch can trigger much more than just a technical operation.

The switches on the sphere impel visitors to interact. Each switch triggers a different event. They change light colour and brightness, cause the disco ball to spin, emit clouds of disco smoke or project song lyrics onto the people in the room via mini projectors. The variety of actions arouses curiosity and a desire to try things out. The words, lyrics and music add a very personal layer to the experience. Where can I play “Light my fire”? Do you know “Hello darkness, my old friend”? Shall we try “Dancin’”? The musical context in ATMOSPHERE awakens so many highly individual memories.
To capture a very personal memory, the sphere opens up at the back to reveal a small cabinet with 17 mirrors that refract your image like in a kaleidoscope. Together with the spotlights, smoke effects and reflective walls, this is the perfect backdrop for a selfie or small group photo. See you on Insta!

The installation is deliberately designed to be temporary and sustainable: It will shortly set off on its travels to be reused elsewhere in the future. The sphere is a self-sufficient construction made of wooden panels that can be disassembled into three parts for safe transport. The idea is that ATMOSPHERE will not only travel around Milan, but will also light up special design events in JUNG showrooms around the world, such as Paris and London. This is why all the other components are deemed hand luggage: the silver wall and floor covering is lightweight coated paper (environmentally friendly Finnish sauna vapour barrier, to be precise), which is temporarily hung and rolled out, making larger installations superfluous.