"Thousands of American households have a chic Aldo Rossi Conical Kettle in their kitchens. But they never use it, because its handle becomes much too hot. The kettle is a fiasco, admits Alberto Alessi, and it is not his first. (That honor goes to a disastrous collaboration with Salvador Dali in 1971.)

"I like fiascoes, because they are the only moment when there is a flash of light that can help you see where the border between success and failure is," says Alessi. "It is a precious experience in the development of new projects.

"Our most beautiful fiasco was the Philippe Starck Hot Bertaa kettle. I did not realize that we had gone too far. Inside the kettle was some complicated but very intelligent engineering that prevented steam from escaping when the water was being poured. On the prototypes, it worked well, but when we produced thousands and thousands, it didn't work so well.

"The kettle was very much criticized. But it was never a stupid project: We just went too far. There were many positives, not least the courage of the designer. He wasn't playing a joke on the customers. He just felt the need to experiment.

"Our customers seem happy to take risks with us, probably because they realize that we're always sincere. They like walking the borderline with us. Customers are much more progressive than marketing people, distributors, or retailers believe. Society is much more exciting than just a target market. A target market is a cage where people try to put society. It bears no relation to what people feel and want." fastcompany.com/magazine/51/alessi.html

"AS ANY JAPANESE FARMER will tell you, achieving consistently high seasonal yields from pinched, narrow land allotments is no mean feat. An integrated circuit, if you reflect for a moment, is not so different from a set of inter-connecting rice-fields: Flat, tightly compartmentalized, they even somewhat resemble one another from above, each segment of the respective structures precision-balanced and compacted for maximum results.

Miniaturization skills learned and transmitted by Japan's master craftsmen, influenced no doubt by the techniques of an agricultural society, are now being vigorously applied in the design of increasingly smaller, lightweight, high-tech products for consumers who want more functions, less bulk, and a high return on a diminutive but empowered item. Little wonder that tiny products like large-scale integrated circuits in Japan are often called "the rice of the high-tech world," a reference to both minuscule grains of rice, perfect units in an integrated mass, and the traditional practice of rice calligraphy, in which as many as 32 ideograms are brush-written or incised onto a single grain". japaninc.net/article.php?articleID=515

"The general characteristics of Deconstructivist design are as follows:

1. Explodes architectural form into loose collections of related fragments.
2. Destroys the dominance of the right angle and the cube by using the diagonal line and the `slice' of space.
3. Uses ideas and images from Russian Revolutionary architecture and design -Russian Constructivism
4. Searches for more DYNAMIC spatial possibilities and experiences not explored (or forbidden) by the Modern Movement.
5. Provokes shock, uncertainty, unease, disquiet, disruption, distortion by challenging familiar ideas about space, order and regularity in the environment.
6. Rejects the idea of the `perfect form' for a particular activity and rejects the familiar relationship between certain forms and certain activities.
7. Note the work of the architects, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi and Zaha Hadid.

Note that while Memphis designs attack the lack of colour, texture, pattern or sensuality of the Modern Movement, Deconstructivism attacks the closed and precise forms and spaces of the Modern Movement. The same design attitudes are simply directed at different aspects of the design of space. wessexcentre.com/My Webs/Theory papers/decon frameset.htm