Trompe L'Oeil on a Desk: Objects Pretending to Be Other Objects
Someone will pick it up. That is the reliable part.
It sits on the desk looking exactly like a kraft paper bag that has been screwed up and half-flattened, the sort of thing that should have gone in the recycling. Then a visitor goes to move it out of the way, finds it rigid, and has to look again. Nobody has ever done that with a pen pot.
An old trick, briefly
Making one material impersonate another is not a novelty invention. Painters have done it for centuries under the name trompe l'oeil, literally deceiving the eye, and ceramicists have been making convincing porcelain crumpled paper for a very long time. The pleasure is consistent and slightly childish: you know it is not paper, you enjoy it anyway, and you enjoy other people not knowing for a second.
What makes it work is precision about the wrong thing. Crumple is difficult to fake. Real creases are irregular, they fold back on themselves, and they have a logic that comes from a sheet being compressed rather than from someone designing a wrinkle. Get that wrong and the object simply looks lumpy. Get it right and the eye is fooled from four feet away.
Where the joke stops
One of these on a desk is a good object. Three of them, plus a bowl shaped like cabbage leaves and a lamp pretending to be a stack of books, is a room that is trying very hard.
Illusion pieces work by contrast with ordinary things around them. They need straightforward company to be surprising against, which is the same reason a single warm object among black technology reads better than a whole desk of warm objects, as we argued in how every desk ends up black. One trick per surface is roughly the limit.
What it holds
Ours is a hard plastic container in the crumpled bag form, about five inches by three and a half by two, in a warm kraft brown, from a design licensed by hpinvent. It takes pens, brushes, small tools, remotes, and the accumulated small hardware of a desk or a vanity.
One firm limitation, and it is the obvious one given the shape: dry items only. It is not for water, cut flowers, or a plant, however much the silhouette suggests a bag you might put something growing into. The illusion stops at the surface.
It also, inevitably, will be mistaken for trash by someone tidying up. This has happened to every owner of every object like this since the invention of the genre, and there is no design solution to it.