Original subtitles

A round movement is better than an up and down movement.

AII right?

These women have gathered for a ritual in Wimbledon.

They're paying homage to a totemic object.

It's a cIassic piece of Tupperware

that has stood the test of time

but it's had a tweak to bring it into the 21 st century.

Fantastic!

lt's one of the most durable designs of the 20th century.

Oh, wow! Now, this is an oId piece of Tupperware.

But it's not much celebrated...

except by people trying to sell it to you.

Most of that product, I think you can put on a tabIe

and it wiII hoId its own with the best crystaI and the best china.

lt if seems anachronistic that parties like these still take place,

that's because most of us take designs like these so utterly for granted.

We have the Iarge bowI, because it's much more practicaI.

Not just what they do, but also what they're made from.

It doesn't Iook dissimiIar to something we might chuck away,

because pIastic's become so disposabIe.

And it's hard to imagine this was once a reaIIy magicaI object

that embodied the kind of aspirations of post-war cuIture.

Now if anybody has a probIem with rice, this is great.

At the end of the Second World War,

one nation's economy was clearly the winner.

The whoIe of the Iate '40s in America

is about that shift from wartime production to consumer market,

and designers were at the forefront of Ieading that new economy,

that new consumer boom.

One designer who harnessed this emerging mass market

and the technological promise of plastic

was Earl Silas Tupper- the inventor of Tupperware.

PeopIe Iike EarI Tupper were aIIowed by pIastics companies

to experiment with potentiaI new consumer types of goods,

because aIthough they had, you know, 40 different types of pIastic,

they didn't reaIIy know what it couId be used for.

That is what makes someone Iike EarI Tupper a genius designer

because his designs were based on the observations of everyday practice in Iife.

There wasn't much of a market for Tupperware

in a post-war Europe of rationing and famine.

But even amidst the rubble of newly liberated Germany, engineer Max Braun declared..

''We're going to make beautiful things. ''

The firm he founded hired a young idealist who shared that mission - Dieter Rams.

The onIy thing that we had in our mind was to cIean up the disturbed worId.

Don't forget, everything was disturbed in Germany.

Everything.

So that was aIso something which was, for us, very important,

to cIean up in a new way.

There was a passionate desire through every waIk of their Iife

to create a new and better worId,

therefore, a gentIer worId as weII.

It was a naturaI reaction to what had gone before.

What this led to at Braun was a new approach to consumer electronics -

rigorously logical designs where decoration was stripped back to a bare minimum.

When this product first hit the market in 1 956, it was utterIy radicaI.

Nothing Iike it had been seen before.

CIear use of circIes for twisting diaIs,

of rectanguIar buttons for press buttons

with concave surfaces inviting the finger to push.

The ceIebration of the object for its own right,

rather than it being an object of which you needed to be embarrassed in your home

and pushed into the background.

The instant clarity of Dieter's designs

clearly obeys the modernist mantra that form should follow function.

After years of propaganda and lies,

the integrity of these designs was more than just pleasing to the eye.

Thinking about new designs in a cIear, honest way,

can aIso heIp the democracy,

which was onIy a smaII pIant at this time, which has to grow.

And we were absoIuteIy sure at this time

that that couId heIp aItogether to make a new society.

Functional hi-tech became the design signature,

not just of Braun, but of post-war West Germany.

Few designers have been as influential.

We used to worship at the aItar of Dieter Rams.

Terrific!

There was a purity and an essence and a perfection about that

which we aII Ioved as designers.

It taught you many, many things about economy of form, apart from anything eIse.

But it taught me personaIIy something very important.

The idea of being abIe to remove that which is unnecessary

and get to the point of what is,

doesn't mean it's dry or emotionIess.

But what it does mean is that it shouId be exactIy what it shouId be

and not an awfuI Iot more.

And 50 years later, Dieter's disciples still seek the Zen of technology.

For us, simpIicity is one of our fundamentaI phiIosophies.

How you can just remove and remove to create something so optimaI,

and I think there's just an inherent beauty when you reach that point

of you couIdn't possibIy soIve these probIems

with anything Iess.

The minimalist route to modern design was also pursued in Britain after the war

on a much larger canvas than domestic technology.

The motorways' extended this idea of modernism to a much bigger, broader worId.

Everybody was drawn into it as they started to use the motorways.

This was something terribIy new to the British,

and, I think, to some peopIe, a IittIe bit frightening.

Construction of the first motorway began in 1 956.

And with it came signs of where the nation was headed.

Just like Dieter Rams' work,

this graphic design is a model of clarity.

You don't want them to be fussy, so it's reaIIy very minimaI.

We were aiming for perfection of a kind.

They were designing in the functionaI tradition.

''Fitness for purpose and simpIicity are the keys to good design''

is the motto those designers were brought up in, and that's what they practised.

Margaret Calvert was straight out of art school when she teamed up with Jock Kinneir

to change the face of Britain's roads.

We were reaIIy seen as vuIgar, brash, brave new worId, I Iike to think.

EngIand was very conservative in terms of very formaI, traditionaI capitaIs,

beautifuIIy spaced, serif typefaces.

DuII, duII, duII.

We IiteraIIy did start from scratch.

ln place of the jumble of old signs,

Kinneir and Calvert created their own font - ''Transport'',

and a uniform standard where every element enhanced legibility.

Your starting point was from the point of view of the driver.

What do you want to know, what do you want to see, and in what order?

From a distance you read word shape.

If you can't read the individuaI Ietters, you're actuaIIy taking in the shape of the name.

Calvert and Kinneir went on to design all Britain's road signage.

Their work has been described as the closest thing we have to a national corporate identity.

And yet, some of the pictograms that are now part of the public landscape,

in fact have a private inspiration.

I started to think of myseIf at that age,

and I based it on me.

I think the hair's stiII the same, isn't it?

Margaret's alter-ego is helping a boy across the road,

a reversal of traditional roles.

The sign that they had for schooIs was a grammar schooI boy,

and I just feIt, ''WeII, why not change it?''

Let's have no schooI uniforms, no reference to grammar schooIs,

because the co-educationaI system was coming in,

and I thought it shouId be more incIusive.

Calvert's graphic was a sign of changing times.

The comprehensive system was taking shape in the same era as the motorways.

As politicians attempted social engineering, designers had more work to do.

After nearly 50 years and 1 4 million sales,

the Polyprop remains hard to beat.

Young designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby

would love to create something with the same qualities..

stackable,

light, strong,

washable

comfortable.

They've studied Day's design closely

from a very early age.

I think I had one over my head once when I was at schooI.

I used to carve into it,

because you couId actuaIIy scratch quite weII into the side of it.

And aIso with a magnifying gIass in the summer you couId burn your name into the back of it.

As a consequence of its universaIity, it's reaIIy hard to Iook at.

It has this kind of anonymity now because it's so present,

and it's so deep rooted in our Iandscape.

The Polyprop was perfect for public buildings,

not least because it was very cheap.

That is the HoIy GraiI for the designer -

to produce the best possibIe Iow-cost piece of furniture.

Day's new chair cost less than a quarter of the price of its traditional wooden rivals

mostly because it was so quick to produce.

It's rather unusuaI to speak of moraIs in this fieId, isn't it?

That peopIe anywhere in the worId couId get chairs that were Iow-cost

and indestructibIe and good for posture and so on,

yeah, I think I feIt that that was a moraI obIigation.

One I was very happy to work on.

It's a sociaIist concept that Iow-cost, good design is right for everybody,

but it's aIso a reaction to over-ornament

and its association with bourgeois Iiving

and it's the idea that good, simpIe design is fit for purpose and fit for everybody.

And this chair is that.

While designers in post-war Britain modestly saw themselves as servants of society,

elsewhere in Europe they were lauded as artists.

No-one could accuse ltalian style of being anonymous or minimal.

I'm Iooking for some exampIes.

Alberto Alessi was born into a firm which embodies the ltalian approach to design.

The company museum is stuffed with six decades-worth of experiments.

These are the very first prototypes of two projects by AchiIIe CastigIioni,

a Iarge fruit bowI.

This is a prototype made by the famous miIIionaires' modeI maker, Sacchi.

The AIdo Rossi coffee pot.

I don't mind so much about what the pubIic wants.

It is aIways difficuIt to interpret what peopIe want,

foIIowing marketing research, I mean.

I prefer to use intuition and sensibiIity.

We use a different method of creation for objects,

which is an artistic system, an artistic method.

This design captures the moment Alessi began producing on an industrial scale.

lt dates from the point when ltalian style began to be exported around the world.

The start of this phenomenon of ItaIian design

is considered to be right after the Second WorId War.

There was a new generation of industriaIists

Iike my father.

ParaIIeI to that, there was an extraordinary generation of new young ItaIian designers.

Many manufacturers were quite happy to taIk to

very interesting avant-garde architects and designers.

They were their friends very often,

and many ItaIian business peopIe had trained as architects or designers

or engineers themseIves.

Quite a different tradition from Britain,

where business peopIe were, on the whoIe, business peopIe.

Marshall Plan Funding encouraged ltalian industry

to move in this artistic and peaceful new direction.

Designer goods built the foundation for ltaly's post-war economic miracle.

So ltalian designers, treated, and sometimes indulged as artists,

were often memorable characters.

The most exuberant of them all was Joe Colombo.

Joe loved jazz, cars,

skiing, drinking, and smoking.

He was also fond of curves and experimentation.

Above all, he loved the notion of change,

and spent his career trying to create the environment of the future.

I remember that it was fantastic to come every year to MiIan Fair

and see what Joey cooked up now.

Because he aIways had something...

You probabIy heard about the convertibIe bed.

The Cabriolet Bed's hood could be brought down like that of a convertible car

to create the kind of privacy sometimes required by a man about town.

lt came with built-in radio, phone,

fan and cigarette lighter.

Everything but the girl.

He had aII sorts of gadgets, which he Ioved,

and he was such a muIti-tasker.

And he was aIso a futurist.

He aIways wanted to know: What wiII happen next?

So he aIways was treading a few steps ahead of the crowd.

And he was a very nice guy, to boot.

ReaIIy nice, good company. He was...

We drank weII together and so forth. He was OK.

ln many ways, Joe was a quintessentially '60s figure.

Above all, in his favourite choice of material.

Plastic had now come of age.

Can you imagine, how from this smeIIy, stinky oiI we have made something incredibIe.

That's why pIastic is one of the incredibIe symptoms of our inteIIigence

and creativity of science.

PIastic is rock 'n roII.

You were suddenIy Iiberated to do whatever you want.

Plastic so perfectly captured the '60s zeitgeist

that in this Brussels museum, the decade is still alive and well.

Here is the first object that I find on the garbage from Joe CoIombo.

I decided this is it.

If they just throw away things of a great designer,

it's time to begin a coIIection.

But when I start, I cannot stop.

PersonaIIy, I Iike that one very much.

I think that if Queen Victoria was stiII Iiving today, she wouId use that.

This is one of the first pieces of the coIIection - the Garden Egg.

When you want to use it, you open it,

and if it begins to rain, you just shut it.

We have here the gIove of Joe DiMaggio

who has been the husband of MariIyn Monroe for one year.

More pop than that is impossibIe to imagine.

It's the BaII Chair of Eero Aarnio from FinIand,

and if you put that in a big area, you have the impression that you bring back a certain...

I don't find the word.

What unites Philippe's collection isn't a single style, or even quality,

it's the uniquely optimistic spirit of the time in which these objects were created.

It was totaIIy different with what the peopIe used to see before the Second WorId War,

and that gives to the youth an impression that there was a new worId beginning.

This is a chair.

You sit here, you put your head here.

Everybody is Iying, and smoking, and dreaming,

and so it was reaIIy the cuIture of the time.

And I Iike that too because I'm running after my youth.

PIastic in the 1 960s reaIIy promises a kind of Iiberation

to both the designer and the consumer.

It is a very enjoyabIe form of design.

It's rather as if furniture itseIf has become a party game

and that these big infIatabIe bits of furniture, they're Iike party baIIoons that chiIdren hoId up.

So Iife's become a party.

Plastic products were perfect for teenage consumers

keen to throw off the austerity of their parents'generation.

Fashionable, affordable, and disposable,

they seduced with a promise of no-strings fun.

Many of these objects are about a very seIf-conscious way

of constructing a new IifestyIe.

A IifestyIe that isn't about inheriting your parents' furniture,

because how do you hand an infIatabIe chair to your chiIdren or your grandchiIdren?

It's about a compIete shift in generationaI understanding of everyday Iiving.

The designer who most exemplified this spirit of the '60s,

who took design to the edge of what was possible and then beyond,

was Verner Panton.

Born in Denmark, he had a very strong tradition to kick against.

Early in his career he worked for Arne Jacobsen,

who designed in a well-established Scandinavian style.

Humane, understated,

sensible.

Everything was brown and beige

and dirty coIours,

and then Verner came with aII his briIIiant coIours

and everybody said that he was absoIuteIy crazy.

Back then peopIe were used to Iiving the same way their grandfathers and grandmothers did,

and it was just not done to change anything.

And he definiteIy wanted to do something eIse and show ''you have other possibiIities too''.

When his 1 958 design for the Cone chair was shown in New York,

the police had it removed from the shop window

because of the size of the crowd that had gathered to see it.

But Verner had only just begun.

He dreamed of something no-one had yet achieved -

a chair that would be moulded entirely from a single unbroken piece of plastic.

Unlike Robin Day's Polyprop, it wouldn't be supported by separate metal legs.

ln fact, it wouldn't really have legs at all.

For three long years, Verner struggled to find a manufacturer who'd take his design seriously.

We were traveIIing around in Europe to find a producer for it,

and that was not very easy.

And then he came to BaseI and showed it to my father,

and my father got interested.

We aII feIt, ''WeII, we have something quite extraordinary, but is it possibIe?''

We first did it in poIyester and fibregIass

and then we worked on foam.

It went back and forth, triaI and error, going through materiaIs.

After several years of intensive technical experimentation,

an astonished world finally got to perch upon the finished product.

That was the first pIastic chair

that was not trying to mimic the chairs that had been there before.

It was the first pIastic chair that was, reaIIy, in that sense, compIeteIy new.

The slender cantilevered seat isjust strong enough to support the human body.

And look, Ma. No legs.

It was the first singIe materiaI, singIe-form chair ever to be injection mouIded in pIastic.

And that is the HoIy GraiI in design -

to create singIe-form products that can be absoIuteIy mass-produced,

just as if they were road cones.

That's what the objective was. It was a dream.

That dream hadn't yet fully come true.

Early production depended on expensive manual labour.

Later models, in a different plastic, frequently broke.

Only in the 1 990s did technology finally reach the point

where the design could be reliably and cheaply mass produced in polypropylene.

The Panton chair is a compIete paradox,

because, whiIe on the one hand it is, without any doubt, a design cIassic,

it was reaIIy a commerciaI faiIure.

It has virtuaIIy no contract appIication.

Can you see this chair in a hospitaI? Can you see this chair in an office?

They were never gonna earn back their costs for the amount of investment.

It was basicaIIy a fIyer they took, and it didn't make it.

But the practicalities were never the whole point.

The S Chair was to furniture what The White Album was to pop music.

As much as it's something to sit on, it's about the concept of a chair.

lt was a design as liberated as its times.

Something Amanda Lear made explicit for the readers of Nova magazine.

There was this idea that we have to compIeteIy forget about tradition.

When peopIe untiI now sat on this height, we have to sit on the fIoor.

If peopIe were doing this standing, we have to do it sitting.

If they were on one IeveI, we have to create two IeveIs.

It was the idea of a totaI new beginning.

For Verner, changing where you sat could change the way you saw the world.

Free your ass, and the mind will follow.

He'd now moved into what he called ''total design'',

wall to wall, and floor to ceiling.

Furniture, textiles, lighting.

And what he's getting into there, high Design with a capitaI D, and environments,

and this new worId of introspection

which was coming out of haIIucinogenic drugs, Iike LSD and mescaIine,

that exempIifies the psychedeIic urge to design an environment

that expresses some kind of inner voyage or trip.

This period saw the start of a design revolution

which would liberate us all in a fundamental way.

But it didn't take the form Panton dreamed of.

As it turned out, the road to personal freedom wasn't paved with psychedelic soft furnishings.

The design philosophy that truly expanded our minds was to make stuff smaller.

Miniaturisation meant you couId be mobiIe,

and if you couId be mobiIe you couId create your own worId and environment.

That strikes me as one of the most significant behaviouraI changes of the past haIf century.

Electronics, like plastics, promised near infinite potential for post-war designers.

Japan rebuilt its economy by creating new technology

it could sell to the world's consumers.

Their most successful corporation realised they had to do more than invent gadgets.

They designed a new lifestyle.

A mobile lifestyle.

Sony's commercial breakthrough came with this portable radio in 1 955.

The transistor had been invented in the United States.

Smaller and more durable than valve technology,

it's the foundation of all modern electronics.

The peopIe who invented the transistor, BeII Labs, in 1 947,

said something Iike, ''There are no commerciaI appIications for the transistor.''

And as far as the Americans were concerned, up to about 1 955, there weren't,

but then Sony showed them that, indeed, there were.

They managed to bring together aII that was best of Japanese cuIture,

which is care, discipIine, attention to detaiI.

They brought that together with briIIiant American technoIogy,

and a bit of American Barnum & BaiIey.

Sony didn't just pioneer new miniaturised products more frequently than their rivals.

They were widely regarded as the market leaders in all aspects of electronics design.

That's the first Sony pocket radio.

In fact, the worId's first pocket radio.

1 956.

This is the originaI Sony Iogo.

The next radios they went over to the newer modern type.

Japan was a very dynamic country,

and peopIe wanted to produce the best, and the smaIIest and the most extreme of everything.

They were hungry, as Germany and ItaIy were at the time.

They wanted a new worId, they had to rebuiId themseIves.

They'd been destroyed. They just tried harder.

Here's one for the girIs.

The way it's presented in a sort of jeweIIery case...

There was a design Ianguage which they deveIoped

which was superbIy abIe to articuIate concepts of miniaturisation and preciousness.

Very good quaIity graphics.

FabuIousIy weII detaiIed smaII controIs and diaIs.

It was aIso dignifying

because it didn't Iook Iike a piece of tat.

It Iooked Iike a piece of something very, very, very precious.

This is a radio with charger and earphones.

It's absoIuteIy minute, as you can see.

The uItimate aim of design is to seII things.

SuccessfuI design, I think, aImost has a toy-Iike magic and passion, feeI.

You sought to see a Sony project and you actuaIIy wanted to touch it.

20 years Iater, Steve Jobs of AppIe Computers said,

''You know a design is good if you want to Iick it.''

It excited cupidity in a way which other products didn't.

lt wasn't just the way these designs looked that sold them,

nor their consistent quality.

Above all, it was the liberation they promised consumers.

The teenagers in the '50s and '60s suddenIy had higher wages.

They couId go out, they had their own Iives rather than having to Iive with their parents

as sort of junior aduIts.

And so they wanted their own... It gave you freedom.

You couId take your music and your tastes with you,

rather than just have to sit at home in front of an enormous great wooden box

Iike previous generations had to.

One design more than any other established the portable lifestyle we now take for granted.

(SPeaks JaPanese)

TRANSLATOR: I got my hands on the prototype

and was aIIowed to waIk around the office with the headphones on.

Such a thing seemed impossibIe.

I remember feeIing Iike I was in a scene from a movie. It was very exciting.

I feeI Iike an archaeoIogist, reaIIy.

So many things to say about this. It's such an evocative product.

But what's reaIIy been designed here is a new human experience.

It wasn't caIIed virtuaI in those days

but the great innovation of the WaIkman was creating a separate reaIity for the user.

Our nomadic desire to carry our world with us wherever we go

had inspired other designers back in the '60s.

The FuturoPod was a rather different interpretation of portable lifestyle.

This one's touching down in Lakewood, New Jersey,

where it's still standing to this day...

.. just about.

There's something very beautifuI about it, and poignant.

The utopian fantasy - that's what it ends up as.

Here's some big funky Ieak right there, dripping water.

A romantic ruin of the modern era.

The Futuro was designed in 1 968 by Matti Suuronen,

and manufactured by Finnish firm Polykem.

lt was built largely from polyester.

Two decades after plastics started appearing in our kitchens,

here was Tupperware you could live in.

They onIy made about 60 or 70 of them, I think.

The iIIusion was that they wouId pIop down Iike spaceships. The heIicopter wouId bring them.

But, of course, they have to be hooked up to a cesspooI and to pIumbing,

so that destroyed the iIIusion.

The Futuro House fell to earth rapidly.

Dreams of space-age living were swiftly grounded.

Just as the pod was launched,

people were beginning to question whether the future was quite as bright

as had long been promised.

This was a criticaI moment in human awareness about the environment.

PeopIe reaIised how toxic pIastic is.

It goes from what's sIeek and sexy

to everything that's bad and negative in Western society.

This sort of feeIing that we can just do anything we want,

we can produce as many things as we want,

we can consume as much as we want, starts to disappear.

We've got to start Iooking after the pIanet,

and stop chucking out pIastic containers and pIastic bottIes.

Neither biodegradable nor easy to recycle,

the material of the future turned out to be hard to get rid of.

lt both lasts too long

yet ages badly.

The mahogany tabIe, it buiIds up a patina.

This kind of materiaIity of use that gives it vaIue,

that makes it more beautifuI the more it's used.

Whereas pIastic actuaIIy Iooks the most beautifuI when it's new.

Vitra, the firm which turned Werner Panton's visions into reality,

now expects its furniture restorer to double as plastic surgeon.

In the '60s, or the post-war time,

they haven't had the knowIedge

about how pIastics wiII behave in the future.

They started just to mix up components to see what happens.

What you see here is they chose poIyester as a pIastic materiaI,

but it's very brittIe.

So because of the brittIeness you have aII these cracks.

When they started to deveIop pIastics,

they thought that they had soIved a Iot of probIems for eternity.

And then, reaIIy, after a very short time, they found out that that is not so.

Just when the future finally arrived,

people realised it wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

PIastic started to go bad at the end of '60s in the popuIar imagination,

and peopIe started to taIk about ''a pIastic worId''.

We don't want to Iive in a pIastic worId. We don't want to be pIastic peopIe.

Those words, those phrases became commonpIace.

PIastic that had been a great saviour

and had become the symboI, in many ways, of a modern post-war worId,

now was going to be consigned to the rubbish dump.

(Air hisses)

SocioIogists were very worried that contemporary Iife

and contemporary reIationships were becoming more and more fIeeting,

and that pIastic as a materiaI was somehow a metaphor

for this transient mobiIe IifestyIe we were aII encountering,

where nobody reaIIy cared too much about the quaIity of their reIationships.

ln the decades after the war, much of the world had felt unprecedented faith in the future.

Design had embodied this promise of progress,

and had aimed to liberate us all.

But by the early '70s, optimism about the future had ebbed away.

Along with it went any excitement about the materials and designs of the post-war period.

Nearly 40 years later, a French factory is about to make another chair.

Plastic balls in one end,

finished furniture out the other.

No assembly required.

They spit out a chair every 40, 60 seconds.

It goes vrrt vrrt vrrt,

and they piIe up and there you go.

This is the perfection of the injection moulding process

pioneered by Robin Day and Verner Panton.

The Monobloc chair is formed from a single seamless piece of plastic.

Each costs barely �2 to make.

Versions are manufactured by dozens of different companies all over the world.

There's no patent on the design or the process.

And they're found absolutely everywhere.

Some say there is as many chairs as there is peopIe on this pIanet.

lt's become the ''Zelig'' of the designed world.

Wherever you look, there it is.

From Buckingham Palace to Baghdad.

lt's the fulfilment of post-war design dreams -

functional, versatile,

mass produced and cheap.

All that's missing is the amazement it would have inspired in earlier generations.

On the one hand, it is so hugeIy successfuI.

On the other hand, no-one reaIIy Iikes it.

PeopIe IiteraIIy hate it.

When you Iook at something Iike this now it just becomes synonymous with IandfiII.

You see them aII at your IocaI refuse tip, piIed sky high.

And they're not broken, they don't reaIIy break,

but peopIe just tire of them.

The thing is about this chair

and the reason why it's been so successfuI in its miIIion different guises

is that it actuaIIy does perform pretty weII.

It's an armchair, it's probabIy quite comfortabIe,

it's incredibIy cheap to produce,

it stacks.

And so it's actuaIIy not as dumb as it Iooks.

It's not an attractive-Iooking piece but it's an incredibIy functionaI thing.

All around us is the stuff that post-war dreams were made of.

And much of it is still made from the material, which just like bronze and iron before it,

defined an age.

If you think about our generation,

our contemporary worId in archaeoIogicaI terms,

what wiII be Ieft? It wiII be pIastic.

We Iive in a totaIIy pIastic worId, a worId transformed by pIastic.

It's just that we can't see it any more, it's not so visibIe.

It's woven into everyday objects, everyday structures from architecture to textiIes.

PIastic is no Ionger an object of optimism.

Plastic is ''ubiquity made visible'', according to Barthes.

The philosopher, rather than the Simpson.

He calls it ''the first magical substance that consents to be banal''.

But, for a particular type of person, plastic remains miraculous.

Life without pIastic for an industriaI designer is aImost unimaginabIe.

We aImost think in terms of pIastic.

Because, with pIastic, we can do aImost anything,

and the frontiers of what's possibIe with pIastic are moving outwards aII the time

affording new possibiIities.

I don't use wood, stone and Ieather

because I have not a Iot of respect for these materiaIs,

because I Iove pIastic.

Our civiIisation is based on inteIIigence

and pIastic is pure human inteIIigence.