design

Sottsass came up in a modernist design world that valued rigidity, utility, and simplicity; asking designers to ask themselves what is necessary and drop everything else. As famed industrial designer Dieter Rams has said, “Good design is as little design as possible.” Sottsass epitomizes basically the complete opposite of that.

Sottsass’s work made the case for the necessity of the superfluous. Expressive use of color, form, and decorative elements are elemental to design done well. In the modern era, design is leaning into sensuality and excitement too. 

We need a new definition of scale that is not about the production volumes of a material but the proliferation and exchange of knowledge. From scaling up to scaling out – or perhaps from scaling up to skilling up.