Familiar Stranger

As a designer, Francesco Pace knows that for a design to
work, it must be absolutely clear about the message it projects.
Cognitived issonance, a discrepancy between what we
believe to be true and what we observe in front of us, breeds
discomfort. We understand the world and feel safe in it through
the narratives we all share and repeat to each other. To relieve
the discomfort, people tend to avoid any situation that may
cause it. And so do designers. Design takes an active part
in creating and maintaining these narratives. Nonetheless, Pace
decided he would play with our expectations. By making us
wrongly believe the materials he uses will have a soft tactility,
he has created a tension in the way we experience his work:
a hard, sturdy doorstopper that looks soft like a sock left on the
floor, a floor tile whose surface appears to have been rippled
by water dripping down on it. Do such choices make ‘failed’
designs, or do they deepen our experience because we need
to think harder before we understand what we are looking at?