Ettore Sottsass was the leading figure of the Memphis design group, and much of what he embodied in that group derived from his earlier experiences as a designer. The ideas he implemented in the design group were ambitious and adventurous. The designs produced were highly successful, but for Sottsass this success was itself only a beginning. While the public clamored for more, he was already looking to the next mode of expression. The Memphis design group had a considerable influence on the industrial design that would follow, an influence still felt today. The Memphis design studio in Milan was started in 1979. As with many European design studios and movements, the Memphis design group appeared to have a greater tolerance for abstract design than did American groups of the time, but in fact the European groups generally looked to American style of the 1950s for inspiration (Dormer 48).
Ettore Sottsass is a product of the upheavals and realities of this century. His national and geographical origins were determined by the changes wrought in World War I and the direction of his career as a designer was defined by the economic and political legacy of World War II. He moved to America in the 1950s, seeing in it the contemporary mecca of industrial and consumer production and progress. In the 1960s, Sottsass went to India along with much of the counter-culture and was closely associated with Pop Art and the Beat Generation. In the 1970s he was a leading figure in the Radical Design movement. In the 1980s Sottsass was involved in projects and products from Hindu poetry to houses. All his efforts have given form to years of research and discussion about the nature of environmental design. Sottsass himself states that there is a fundamental political basis for existence. Sottsass has asked people to reconsider the scale of values built up by political status systems, and he has suggested other ways of doing and seeing thi...