Agence Quarks and Nicolas Triboulot have been thinking along those lines, and the French designers recently developed a new way to turn lights on and off without relying on a switch.  They call their touch-sensitive paint, “ON/OFF” and the concept seems simple enough. 

Once the paint has been applied to a wall, “a simple touch detects the contact desired by the user to control an electrical appliance. This ‘switch’ is no longer positioned at an exact location only a few square centimetres in size but on the entire surface of the wall. The paint can be applied with a roller or a brush, on any background (plaster, wood, concrete, plastic, etc.) It may be covered in a coat of paint the colour you want, or wallpaper, without losing effectiveness. ON/OFF may be combined with a lamp, an alarm, roller blinds or any electrically-controlled appliances. You can add another function to the unit such as a dimmer, timer or plug” (Nusca).  The paint relies on an “electronic mechanism” that is hidden (I assume somewhere within the wall but so far I haven’t been able to find out exactly how the system works).  If anyone has a sample of this paint or knows how the electronic mechanism functions please please let me know!

Image courtesy www.smartplanet.com

I am captivated by the idea that the ON/OFF switch is “everywhere without being seen” (APCI).  You could paint a small strip, a whole wall, or an isolated area to use as a switch.  I can imagine painting the wall behind my bed, then reaching backwards to turn out the lights and go to sleep.  It could be used by elderly or disabled people who need to trigger an alarm, or to create games, and it would be helpful to be able to bump a wall with a foot to turn on the lights when one’s hands are full (Nusca). While I suspect that this idea is more conceptual than fully-baked, it seems rife with possibilities.  How would you use this paint?  Hit the comments.

WU XING:

I’m filing touch-sensitive paint in the Fire and Water categories.  Fire because of the elctric component and water because paint flows over surfaces.

Cited:

Nusca, Andrew. “Touch Sensitive Wall Paint Turns Lights On, Off.” Smartplanet.com.  01/06/11. Accessed 01/20/11.  URL.