90 | INTUITION
cal perspective, but it’s never an environment to feel at home in.” Designing a meeting room should be like designing a house, she says, and she has experience of both. But she sees no difference between the specific function of a meeting room and its milieu: “Naturally, a meeting room would probably need more than one chair, considering that a room like that would be like designing an office for me. I like the idea of removing all that normally characterises an office and making it look like a normal home in a normal house. In the same way I’d try to make a meeting room feel like a large room in my own house and shift the focus from the technical requirements to the personal feeling.” MEETINGS INTERNATIONAL No 3 2009
Is it possible to bring people closer to each other through design? “No, I believe that the actual meeting between people is a conscious thing. Design can help to create an environment that is more or less comfortable and pleasant, but it is through the consciousness that we meet.” The offices that Paola Navone has designed, including one for a fashion company, do not look like real offices, something that she herself maintains: “I ensure that the rooms are not similar, different types of floor for example. Then I choose material that doesn’t feel cold and impersonal, material that gives the room a personal touch.” One of Paola Navone’s charac-
teristics is that she gladly mixes styles and material in order to create contrasts. “I like opposites. Not only old and new, but soft and hard or matt and shiny.” In much the same way, her partiality to mistakes in design has become well known: “A mistake can add a bit of excitement to a process that sometimes tends to be too perfect, too even and stable. Trying to make mistakes is interesting. I sometimes advise my customers to do it in the production process to make the objects look different, but I haven’t been particularly successful. Customers don’t like the thought,” she says laughing aloud. It’s a liberating laugh. π