The term 'Postmodernism' has been applied to many disciplines including architecture, design, literature, communications, music, sociology, and film. In relation to architecture and design, by the late 1950s the visual language of Modernism was increasingly equated with the tastes of the educated professional classes, the corporate aesthetic of successful multinational companies, and the outlook of an architectural establishment that had taken up a vocabulary derived from radical avant-garde tendencies in the interwar years. Firmly embedded in the contemporary world of television, passenger jet air transportation, foreign travel, and nuclear energy the burgeoning Postmodern Zeitgeist (or 'spirit of the age') of the later 1950s and early 1960s was to many—particularly younger architects, designers, and consumers—emphatically different from that of 1920s and 1930s Modernism. The early 1960s was a period in which the ephemeral values of Pop came of age, its brightly coloured, culturally diverse, and image-rich ethos increasingly at odds with the rational, restrained aesthetic associated with the Modernists' exploration of new materials, manufacturing technologies, and abstract forms in the decades before the Second World War.

Ornament is an important feature of the Postmodernist vocabulary, a characteristic very much opposed by Modernist practitioners and theorists such as Adolf Loos, whose article on Ornament and Crime of 1908 anticipated the antipathy to the decorative arts of leading figures such as Le Corbusier in the 1920s. In fact the use of ornament in design had engendered fierce critical debate since the middle of the 19th century when many of the heavily decorated and patterned exhibits at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London attracted the hostile attention of a number of influential critics who saw it as culturally decadent and the physical embodiment of profit-oriented commercialism. The most vociferous 20th-century inheritors of this design reform outlook were closely associated with the shaping of the Modern Movement. Among them was the theorist Herbert Read, who, in Art & Industry (1934), saw it as a sign of decadence and based on the ‘same instinct that causes certain people to scribble on lavatory walls, others to scribble on their blotting pads’.

One of the best-known maxims associated with Postmodernist architecture and design is architect, designer, and writer Robert Venturi's ‘less is a bore’, an ironic subversion of the Modernist credo ‘less is more’. Although the architectural and design historian and author of Pioneers of Modern Design Nikolaus Pevsner had disapproved of what he detected as a growing trend towards ‘Postmodern’ electicism in an essay of 1961, Venturi did much to begin to define the term more tightly in his landmark book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in 1966. In this—in opposition to the clarity of form and enduring values associated with Modernism—he identified a number of Postmodern characteristics including hybridity, ambiguity, distortedness, inconsistency, and equivocality. Such ideas were further developed in Venturi's 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas, written with fellow architects Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. They advocated the use of a visual language that could be widely understood, drawing on the visual imagery and symbolism of popular culture seen in the vibrant, often neon-lit, façades of the hotels, casinos, restaurants, and other entertainment buildings in Las Vegas. However, the popular visual language of billboards and façades explored by Venturi in Learning from Las Vegas had been a developing trend in business circles in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe for well over a decade. In business as well as architectural and design theoretical circles there had also been a growing interest in the formulation of a visual syntax that explored the aspirations and desires of consumers through a more sophisticated understanding of the driving forces of popular culture, an outlook that was fiercely attacked by the American writer Vance Packard in his best-selling book The Hidden Persuaders of 1957. Increasing investment in Motivational Research, especially in the United States, further refined understanding of the visual language of advertising and retailing. Leading figures in the field were the social anthropologist Burleigh Gardner of Social Research Inc. and Austrian-born Dr Ernst Dichter, president of the Institute for Motivational Research and author of The Strategy of Desire (1960).

Next to Venturi one of the most important figures involved in the definition of Postmodernism in architectural and design circles was the American architect, designer, theorist, historian, and prolific writer Charles Jencks, whose major books included The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977) and Postmodern Classicism (1983). Further definitions of Postmodernism have been explored in the writings of cultural theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard. The latter proposed in his book The Post-Modern Condition (1984) that Postmodernism was a rejection of the universal certainties of the Modernist world in favour of the local and provisional. Further underlining the variety and complexity of the ways in which the term has been utilized was Marxist writer Frederic Jameson's view that Postmodernism was a form of American cultural imperialism and an expression of multinational and consumer capitalism. The emergence of Postmodernism also coincided with the rise of service-based, Post-Industrial economies and the demise of the production-based economies associated with Fordism. Furthermore, computerized flexible production runs that could respond swiftly to the varied consumer demands of a pluralist society began to replace the large-scale production runs geared to satisfying homogeneous mass markets.

Dissatisfaction with the restrictions of the Modernist approach was also evident in the creative outlook of Italian designers associated with the Neo-Liberty style of the 1950s. They sought to revive the expressive, organic, forms of Art Nouveau and showed considerable respect for craft traditions—the antithesis of the standardized, machine-made forms of Modernist design. Prominent in the Neo-Liberty movement was the furniture designer Carlo Mollino. Also concerned with the possibilities of a richer visual syntax than that of Modernism in their exploration of the semantic possibilities of architecture and design were Italian writers such as the theorist and historian Gillo Dorfles and academic, novelist, historian, and cultural theorist Umberto Eco. Like the French sociologist Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957), Eco explored the field from the late 1950s onwards, his texts including A Theory of Semiotics (1976). Dorfles's writings included a 1969 edited book of essays entitled Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, its focus on popular culture being intrinsically opposed to the tenets of Modernism and associated ideas of ‘Good Design’. During the 1960s Italian avant-garde designers turned their backs on the dictates of mainstream manufacture in favour of experimentation, the publication of manifestos, involvement in research and education, and the mounting of exhibitions. Important amongst these was the 1972 Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Emilio Ambasz. Leading figures such as Ettore Sottsass Jr. and Anti-Design and Radical Design groups such as Archizoom and Superstudio drew on the iconography of Hollywood films and Pop and were also attracted to alternative lifestyle models such as those of the hippies. Colour, ornament, and decoration, together with kitsch, irony, and distortion of scale, were all key ingredients in Postmodernism. Following on from this was the work of Studio Alchimia, established by Alessandro Mendini in 1976 although its continuing commitment to design polemics rather than an exploration of the creative potential of design as a powerful agent for change in the world of production led Sottsass to form a new group, Memphis, in 1981. Associated closely with ‘New Design’, a term widely used in 1980s Italy that referred to design work that broke with international style and functionalism, Memphis in many ways epitomized the spirit of Postmodernism. However, Sottsass believed that the latter was American, academic, and restricted in its cultural references. Memphis embraced many design fields including furniture, textiles, carpets, lighting, clocks, ceramics, and interiors, drew on an eclectic range of sources including kitsch, Art Deco, and Pop and married cheap and expensive materials, popular and high culture references, thus imaginatively extending the contemporary design syntax.

Postmodernism was intrinsically bound up with notions of fashion and change associated with graphics, clothing, and retail design despite the fact that many of its original theoretical debates were bound up in the concerns of those who sought to open up fresh expressive possibilities in the more durable outputs of architecture. It flourished most vigorously during the 1980s when new markets for the conspicuous consumption of iconic products flourished and designers emerged as artistic celebrities. All of them stimulated, and catered for, the growing consumer demand for household goods endowed with cultural and aesthetic status. One particular, and often comparatively affordable, feature of Postmodern design was its increasing investment in the production of small-scale products for the table and kitchen—dinnerware, glassware, and metalware—a field where contemporary initiatives had for many years been heavily overshadowed by manufacturers' (and many consumers') preoccupation with traditional forms and patterns. Many of these products were closely associated with the preoccupation that many Postmodern designers, particularly the significant number who came from an architectural background, had with contemporary architecture on a vastly reduced scale. Such designs—including salt and pepper grinders, jugs, tea and coffee pots, sugar bowls, plates—were often referred to as items of ‘table architecture’ or ‘microarchitecture’. The first Swid Powell collection of porcelain dinnerware, silverware, and glass to embrace such trends was launched in 1984. The architecturally conceived Tea and Coffee Piazza project of 1980, coordinated for Alessi by Alessandro Mendini, did much to promote the company's tableware, also described as ‘domestic landscape’ and set the scene for related Alessi initiatives over succeeding decades.

Like Modernism, Postmodernism is an international language finding expression in much of the industrialized world including Europe, Scandinavia, the Far East—particularly Japan—and Australia. Catering for the new breed of design-conscious consumers keen to purchase affordable status symbols for the domestic environment were widely recognized companies such as Alessi, Ajeto, FSB (Franz Schneider Brakel), Källemo, Knoll, Swatch, Swid-Powell and WMF (Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik). The heightened media preoccupation with design in the years in which Postmodernism emerged led to considerably increased emphasis on the cult of the designer celebrity. In addition to the designers mentioned earlier, other well-known designers associated with Postmodernism include Andrea Branzi, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Toshiyuki Kita, Danny Lane, Javier Mariscal, Borek Sípek, Philippe Starck, Matteo Thun, and Stanley Tigerman.

(Source: Modern Design Dictionary)