These designs are for funcitonal pieces of furniture, although they flout any traditional expcectations and preconceptions of how a set of shelves should look and work. The 'Carlton' has the character of a playful anthropomorphic being, like a stickman or insect, as inteded by the designer. Both designs have a speckled effect on the base, a surface decoration technique derived from patterns used for plastic laminates form the 1950s and which was used extensively by the Memphis group.

These pieces of furniture clearly show how Ettore Sottsass, in a conscious bid to create objects using 'non-cultural imagery', drew on a wide range of cultural references not previously associated with design. He founded the Memphis design group in Milan in 1981 to explore the potential impact of aricher visual design language. The group's aim was to produce everyday objects but wiht a high aesthetic quality, created through the application of bright colours and decoration onto imaginative forms. Memphis wanted to challenge the relationship between manufacturers and customers where the makers were led by consumer demand for standardised commodities, which was the culmination of mass-machine production for mass markets.