Ettore Sottsass

Italian postmodernist designer who brought meaning to everyday objects

It would not be difficult to find yourself living a life shaped almost entirely by Ettore Sottsass, the greatest Italian designer of the last half century, who has died in Milan aged 90. So many everyday things could bring you into an intimate physical connection with his work and his constantly inventive mind. At home, the bed, the bath, as well as the taps, and the door handle, and the door itself, could all have been designed by him. So could the dining table, the book shelves, and the kitchen furniture. At work, there are plenty of Sottsass-designed desks and chairs, lights and light switches to choose from. There are knifes and forks and spoons and glasses and plates and cups that go on selling in their thousands all designed by Sottsass. And if you happened to live in Milan, even the airport has a Sottsass interior, though Malpensa is not, it has to be said, the most successful of his projects.

All of these, and countless other artefacts large and small, from television sets, to precious glassware, from fashion shops for Esprit, to calculators for Olivetti, are all the product of Sottsass, and his team, the most productive, and one of the most influential design studios Italy has ever produced.

When most people are thinking about retirement, Sottsass reinvented himself as the father of postmodernism in design, by starting the Memphis movement in 1981 - an explosion of colour and energy that was a revolt against complacency and conventional good taste. Memphis was a joyous, entirely unbossy manifesto for design as an emotional expression. It was also an attempt to bite the hand that fed it by gently satirising designers. Design is, in the end, about making us want to buy more things, and Sottsass, at heart always deeply subversive, was highly ambivalent about that.

We live in a world which values the useless ahead of the useful, which celebrates art, untainted by the least hint of utility, above the ingenuity of design that is burdened by function, and creates a cultural hierarchy to match. It was perhaps the greatest achievement of Sottsass's long and remarkable career that he made this distinction irrelevant. He was not interested in making objects that sell because they look pretty or seductive or precious. What he wanted to do was to find ways to give everyday objects some sort of meaning. He wanted to show that they are not just banal clutter, but are shaped by creative intelligence and an understanding both of how they are used, and how they are made.

Throughout his life, Sottsass managed to pursue two parallel careers. At the same time that he was working on the mass produced, trying to give some sense of dignity to the mundane, he was also creating ceramics, and glass, and limited edition furniture pieces that had the emotional intensity of art.

The design world has become fixated by youth, and by the merciless pursuit of the next big thing. But age had no effect on Sottsass, despite his sardonic, hooded bloodhound eyes, that had a certain sadness in them. With the English designer Chris Redfern, he was still running a busy and active office that was doing creative work right up until the end of his life. Last year, he designed, with restrained elegance, the exhibition staged by the Design Museum in London to mark his 90th birthday.

Sottsass showed that it was possible to understand design as a cultural as well as a technical issue. When he designed the Valentine portable typewriter for Olivetti in 1969, with the British designer Perry King, he was able to turn a piece of office equipment into a desirable object by understanding that there are emotions involved as well as ergonomics in the way that we use and understand our possessions.

Sottsass made the Valentine out of bright red plastic, with twin splashes of vivid orange for the spools; turning it from a machine into a kind of toy. As he put it himself, "the sort of thing to keep lonely poets company on Sundays in the country". Four decades later, Jonathan Ive did the same for Apple, with the iPod, turning technology that grew out of office equipment into a desirable possession.

Sottsass, like his father, also called Ettore, saw himself first and foremost as an architect. Almost all Italian designers trained as architects, and too many of them want to go back to designing buildings, even though they are manifestly better sticking to the scale of cutlery and chairs. Sottsass was an exception in that he really was a highly gifted architect, even though he was entirely outside the mainstream. Sottsass knew everybody, and worked everywhere. He even managed to build an apartment in the unlikely setting of Albany in London for Johnny Pigozzi, the celebrity photographer. At the other end of the scale he designed a golf resort for the People's Liberation Army in China.

Sottsass was born in Innsbruck in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, educated in Turin, and moved to work as an architect in Milan before being drafted into the Italian army. As a young officer he took part in Mussolini's invasion of Montenegro. After the Italian collapse, he and his men walked home to Milan.

He worked briefly in America for George Nelson, an experience that gave him an edge when Olivetti wanted some transatlantic expertise to give shape to their first main frame computer, the Elea. It was a measure as much of Olivetti's open-mindedness, as Sottsass's own skills, that he could find himself moving from making folded metal umbrella stands to working on Italy's most advanced piece of high technology in just 10 years.

What Sottsass brought to the exercise was a way to make the software designers, and the engineers, more than a random piece of functional equipment. In Sottsass's eyes a machine as big as a house that could think needed to be treated with respect. He gave it a character and a personality.

Sottsass, the last survivor of the generation of designers that dominated Italian design for half a century, also trained the next generation. Memphis put Sottsass at the centre of an international group of architects and designers who have moved on to build their own careers: from Johanna Grawunder from the US, and British-born James Irvine, to Michele de Lucchi, who is perhaps the most successful of the new generation of designers in Italy.

Sottsass is survived by his second wife, the writer Barbara Radice.

· Ettore Sottsass, designer, born September 14 1917; died December 31 2007

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