Ettore Sottsass Jr, flamboyant, highly original and occasionally despised, was a leading member of the generation which established postwar Italy's reputation for design. Sottsass made his name in the 1960s as an industrial designer for Olivetti who, through colour, form and styling, managed to bring office equipment into the realms of popular culture.

Born in Innsbruck in 1917, the son of an architect, Sottsass studied architecture in Turin, where his parents had moved in 1928. In his youth his ideas on the importance of colour were influenced by the work of painters such as Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky and Dufy; later, the Surrealists were to make him aware of the expressive power of organic shape and space. After serving as a soldier during the Second World War he set up his own architectural office in Milan in 1947, one of a new group of Italian designers which included Gio Ponti and Carlo Mollino dedicated to postwar reconstruction. Sottsass's designers were often featured in Domus, and he participated regularly in the Triennale exhibitions.

In 1954 he began designing ceramics; over the years he used ceramic forms, such as the Tantra and Yantra series of 1969 and 1970, to express his more mystical, spiritual thoughts. Sottsass was much travelled — he went to Europe, America, India and the Far East — and combined elements of both East and West in his personal philosophy. But it was perhaps the month he spent in America in 1956 that did most to set his future course. He worked for the industrial designer George Nelson, whose exuberant creations for Herman Miller embodied the postwar consumer boom. Sottsass was transfixed.

Despite his lack of technical knowledge, Sottsass became a consultant to the Olivetti Company in 1959, designing its electronic equipment, typewriters and office furniture. He not only did away with the idea that a machine is merely a box, but introduced bright colour-coded controls, and considered such equipment as part of the human landscape, lowering the height of the ELEA 9003 computer, for example, so that the operators could see each other over the top.

In 1969 he designed the bright red plastic portable Valentine typewriter, which became the ultimate fashion accessory for the “girl-about-town” of that era. In America, he had picked up on what he called the “surburban slang” of the heyday of consumer culture. In the 1960s he also incorporated many Pop Art images into his work, believing that products should appeal not to the intellect but to the senses; that they should be transient, reflecting the actual desires and nervous energies of their time.

As an industrial designer, his clients included Fiorucci (he designed its first boutique in Milan in 1967), Esprit, the Italian furniture company Poltonova, Knoll International, Alessi and the city of Turin, for whom he designed street furniture. He also continued to design ceramics, jewellery and glass.

In 1981, at the age of 64, he created Memphis, an international group of young architects and designers led by Sottsass himself. Memphis was launched with a collection of 40 pieces of furniture, ceramics, lighting, glass and textiles which, with their squiggley laminate patterns, fluorescent colours and intentionally lop-sided shapes, were an uncompromising challenge to the prevailing doctrine of “classic” good taste, which he condemned for its expressive poverty.

These mischievous and unlikely pieces were dismissed as tricksy, cocktail-cabinet designs, mere whims of fashion, and it was said that only affluent Dallas psychiatrists would ever buy such designs. Yet Memphis colour and eccentric style quickly percolated into every artery of design, from television graphics to jewellery, from furnishings to high street corporate images, vindicating Sottsass's instinctive feel for the contemporary mood.

The name Memphis, combining echoes both of Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan's Tennessee and of Ancient Egypt, where Memphis was home of the god Ptah, protector of artists, is a mixture of cultural messages — new and old, low and high culture — that perfectly ecapsulated Sottsass's sophisticated and individual philosophy.

Sottsass continued to design well into his eighties, with his work remaining fashionable and his plastic fantasies influencing a much younger generation of designers. A retrospective exhibition, Ettore Sottsass: Work in Progress, was held at the Design Museum in London in 2007.

In 1949 he married Fernanda Pivano, from whom he was later divorced. They had no children.

Ettore Sottsass Jnr, designer, was born on September 14, 1917. He died on December 31, 2007, aged 90