Abstract
Like very few other designers Ettore Sottsass has been able to carry everyday aesthetic and functional fittings into those realms that Willi Baumeister called "the unknown in the art" - realms in which one is dealing with the creation of new boundary areas between imagination and experience, between personal intuition and design professionality. Within Sottsass's working fields of product design, architecture, furniture/interiors and sculpture/painting/applied arts, his key approaches to function and sign, to method and message are analysed and exemplified, including comparisons with historical predecessor like Marcel Breuer (Bauhaus) and others.