My feelings about Limited Production/ Experimental Design

This sort of design, with no specific user group in mind, has its own place in the spectrum of design-related activity.
Material explorations, unorthodox directions and wistful, “why-not” products may not necessarily be welcome in the supply-conscious world which I envision in the future, but their existence is justified, even vindicated, by the fact that these are manifestations of a very important human trait: lateral thought.
Lateral thought is one of the most important ideation tools available to the Industrial Designer.
Industrial Design, at least for me, is the discipline of producing tools that will improve the consumer’s quality of life. That means review and examination of individual lifestyles, the identification of common problems/needs and the attempt to improve the experience of living by encouraging modified behavior around the new tool.
When addressing a problem, traditionally, one looks at past situations where similar conditions were present to inform a solution. This method is called logical, safe, conservative, informed by precedent. Although this line of thought is often successful in producing positive results, there is always the drawback that the disadvantages of the new process versus past processes will be analogous.
In our times of heavily consumer taste-driven product design, the issue of creating a new product has more to do with market research than intuition. After being given a brief, the designer will examine existing products in the field of interest and compile statistics based on market research and consumer trends. During the design phase, these values will weigh heavily on influencing the shape and features of the product, to the point where one could argue that the new product is merely an amalgamation of all that is good in existing designs, culled, cut and stitched together in a new color range and package. It would appear that there is a distinct lack of imagination and intuition in this process. Not to mention humanity.
I have chosen to examine the Memphis design movement as an example of limited production design.
Ettore Sottsas, Italian designer/architect, famous for his 1969 Olivetti red “Valentine” typewriter, founded Memphis (Milan) in 1981 as a separate platform for experimentation, a research lab, which, admittedly, was not expected to sell much, if at all. The idea was to altogether remove the smothering pressures of commercial design, so that ideas could develop and come into their own in a nurturing environment.
Sottsas and his design team were thus able to produce furniture and decorative objects which existed in a world of their own, made no direct reference to the market and product precedents, and exuded iconoclastic character to great acclaim.
Memphis’s style, retrospectively, seems to sum up the aesthetic of the 1980’s. Whichever product you care to choose, they all seem to bring to mind the color, shape, experiments and sometimes the just-plain-wrongness that seemed so common to design from a decade which many seem to want to forget.

“I truly believe that our duty as an architect or a designer is to design
things which attract luck, rooms which protect people...”
“I design things for life states.”
Ettore Sottsass