“Normal” forms combine
with outstanding function
Simple Shapes
Designer Naoto Fukasawa has this to say about Magis founder Eugenio Perazza:
“He’s like a child; he loves the shapes
that he has attachments to, and the
technical challenge of doing what
nobody else has done before.”
- Naoto Fukasawa
Super Normal
And when Fukasawa’s design for a desk had progressed to a certain point, Perazza looked at it and said, unexpectedly, “Let’s make a stool.” Voila! The Deja-vu stool.
The stools debuted in 2005 at Milano Salone—the Milan furniture fair. Later that same day, Fukasawa received a call from British designer Jasper Morrison, who loved them and wanted to congratulate Fukasawa on what he said was a subtle and distinctive design. And he told Fukasawa that a mutual friend had described the stools as “super normal.”
Something Special
That set the two designers on a path that ended with Super Normal exhibitions in Tokyo and London. It was a response to what Morrison and Fukasawa saw as the trend among young designers toward creating designs aimed primarily at garnering media attention. “Designers generally don’t think to design the ‘ordinary,’” Fukasawa told the New York Times. “If anything, they live in fear of people saying that their designs are ‘nothing special.’ ‘Normal’ has come to mean ‘boring.’”
Without being aware of any of these discussions, Perazza suggested Deja-vu as a name for the new stool, because it was something already existing in people’s memories. “I thought so too,” Fukasawa says, adding that Perazza had obviously “grasped the sense of Super Normal.”
