The design of plastics

During the late ’50s and throughout the ’60s, an infinite range of new plastic materials appeared, the key features of which were their shapeability, their compatibility with numerous production systems — extrusion, thermoforming, compression, injection and blow moulding, etc. — their strength and durability, and the widest imaginable variety of colour finishes available. So it was that plastics, in all their different guises, became the material of choice for European design, given the advantages they offered in engineering terms, but also by virtue of the innovative message they were able to send out.