Higher National Diploma in 3D Design Year 1: Anti and Radical Design

Introducing 'Anti/Radical-Design'
Radical Design in Shanghai, 2012

Anti-Design was a design flow and style art movement originating in Italy and lasting from the years 1966 - 1980. The movement emphasized striking colours, scale distortion (ex. giant chairs that make you look small), and used irony and kitsh. The function of the object was to subvert the way you thought about the object. In architecture this was also known as the Radical Design period.

The design movement was a reaction against what many avant-garde designers at the time saw as the perfectionist aesthetics of Modernism. The Modernist designers placed emphasis was on style and the aesthetics of good form by many leading manufacturers and celebrated designers (some of whom were being paid big bucks in the process).

The Life and Times of Ettore Sottsass.

Ettore Sottsass Jr. was a key spokesman of the Anti-Design movement once it took off and grew in popularity, as were the Radical Design groups Archigram (a British architecture magazine which emphasized alternative thinking and futurist architecture) and Superstudio (an architecture firm founded in 1966 in Florence, Italy). They were all expressing their ideas by producing furniture prototypes, exhibition pieces, and publication of manifestos full of ideas that are still considered revolutionary even today.