ngs. He himself has noted that his output, in terms of actual industrially produced objects, has been relatively small, but he also insists that it is not necessary to possess his work to be affected by it (Burney 14).
When Sottsass returned to Italy from America at the end of the 1950s, he found that Italy was entering the age of consumerism. He had written earlier about the dangers of nostalgia for handicraft as a metaphor for conservatism, but he believed that the new objects created by designers should still retain the expressive, visionary, ritualistic qualities of their predecessors. In the late 1960s Sottsass participated in the vision of a young, optimistic society in which disastrous social organizations, cultural blackmailing by the government, and fear would be replaced by an affluent industrial culture (Burney 22-23).
A trend in design and art in the late 1960s was a reaction against neorealism and toward a new search for expression through the language of the work itself. Ettore Sottsass was one of the names associated with this trend. He was largely a designer by training, but he had other qualities that he brought to the movement. During these years, Italy tried to organize a school of industrial design by converting art institutions into schools of design and by introducing the designer into the administration of industrial corporations. The most avant-garde example is that of the team of Adriano Olivetti and Ettore Sottsass Jr., which worked in the field of electromechanics, electronics, and small computers (Gregotti 101).
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