Britain has never been entirely clear about how to understand what it is that designers do. Are they offering a service, or is design a form of cultural self-expression? Gerard Taylor, who has died aged 70, always believed that it can be both.
The Scot learned this early on in his career, when in 1981 the great Italian designer Ettore Sottsass invited him to join his Memphis collective, not long after Taylor had graduated from the Royal College of Art in London. A kind of anti-Bloomsbury group based in Milan, Memphis turned the conventional idea of good taste upside down with a series of deliberately transgressive collections of furniture, glassware and domestic electronics, using cheap materials such as plastic laminate and a vibrant colour palette. The self-initiated work that Taylor did for Memphis, as well as under his own name in those days, such as his sculptural ceramics or, later, with Daniel Weil, the Quasimodo chair, which looked like the physical realisation of a cafe chair in a Cubist painting, are in museum collections now, or sought after at auction.
