Can we design familiarity?

This contribution will revolve around a specific question, namely to what extent familiarity can be designed. In order to answer this question, I will first resort to Everyday Aesthetics, and characterize the crucial notion of everydayness in terms of familiarity. I will compare this latter with similar, but not identical, philosophically relevant concepts such as habit and niche with which, I claim, it shares the characters of stability and control upon experience, but with different degrees of dynamicity. Then, I will attempt to locate familiarity on the spectrum along which various kinds of Experience Design run. In this way I will bring to the fore a tendentially antinomic feature of both familiarity and Experience Design. Finally, I will emphasize how such a feature makes the designer and the experientor’s aim to attain familiarity not easy to be fulfilled directly, and how at the same time it can be productive, if it is managed processually and indirectly.