The first and last time I met Ettore Sottsass he muttered, “I should be dead”. At 83, he was, admittedly, getting on a bit, but he could have passed for ten years younger. But it wasn’t age that bothered him. It was the occasion, an exhibition about Memphis, the ground-breaking 1980s design movement that he founded. “Retrospectives,” he harrumphed. “May as well be in a coffin.”

Six years on and Italy’s greatest living designer is, well, still living, while others of his stellar generation, the one that made postwar Italy synonymous with design, have long since ascended to the studio in the sky.

And grumble as he might, those retrospectives keep on coming. He has lived long enough to become unfashionable and fashionable again several times over. Right now he’s hot: original works sell for tens of thousands of pounds, while his poppy plastics are quoted by design’s current establishment (Jonathan Ive) and rising stars (Jaime Hayon, les frères Bouroullec).

Sottsass may or may not make it to open the Design Museum’s show on him on Thursday – he has a chronic bad back – though this is probably just as well. Like a pop group on the comeback trail, it’s the new songs he wants to play, not the greatest hits. At 89, the man is still working furiously.

He’s often called an “ enfant terrible” or “maestro”: he plays both parts impeccably, despite his enfant years being somewhat distant. When Memphis arrived in 1981, with self-conscious wackiness it swept away 1970s beige with furniture dressed like a 1980s pop video, in deafening colours, squiggles and plasticky laminates – “transferring into the world of the Western home the culture of rock music, travel and a certain excess,” said one of its members, Nathalie Du Pasquier.

It ditched the parsimony of the previous decade with New Romantic 1980s, half DIY-style, like badly applied eyeshadow, half genuine marbled glamour.

Memphis still divides opinion as sharply as Marmite. To some it’s glorious 1980s pop, the Human League, perhaps. To others it’s Bucks Fizz on speed. As such, it did its job perfectly, appalling the dry Modernist old guard with form follows function etched on their hearts. Function, to paraphrase Sottsass, can jolly well follow form for a while.

Memphis, though, was merely Sottsass’s latest transgression, at the age of 64. His first was not to follow his illustrious father into architecture. Though he graduated in architecture – indeed, his family moved to Turin from his native Innsbruck to be close to what was then Italy’s best architecture school – he had an artist’s mentality, an intolerance of compromise.

A month working for the American industrial designer George Nelson in 1956 finally convinced him. Nelson designed America’s postwar consumer boom. His “atomic” clocks and the Marshmallow sofa set the fun-functionalist tone for the age of the Cadillac, whose sheer exuberance, colour and, of course, money entranced so many artists from Europe in the 1950s. Seeing New York for the first time, said Sottsass, with its beat culture and emerging pop art, “changed me inside and out”.

His move from architecture to objects was perfectly timed. The postwar decades were to be the first age of mass commodities, and Sottsass was the man who would design them.

Back in Italy, he landed a jammy job as a creative consultant for the electronics wing of Olivetti – incredible, given his lack of technical knowledge and overt “artistic” approach. Olivetti has since been lauded as the Apple of its day, creating easy-to-use products designed from the user’s perspective with a space-age jollity not only to banish fear of technology but to make consumers fall for inanimate machines. Calculators could be cute. Sottsass designed Italy’s first mainframe computer, Elea 9003; his iBook, though, was Valentine, a portable typewriter in a tomato red carry case, complete with funky ad campaign.

Or not. Valentine wasn’t a huge sales success, but its spirit of technology with personality was incredibly prescient. Sottsass didn’t want to ditch function, just to make it less functionalist. “I try to make objects that have a certain strength of communication,” he wrote, “objects that vibrate . . . Objects for me are both spiritual and emotional experiences.” Falling in love with a second country convinced him of this.

Visiting India in 1961, Sottsass was struck by its people’s ritualistic, even sacred, attachment to everyday objects. A bowl was not just a bowl but imbued through decoration and use with layers of common meaning. His would be a new take on William Morris’s assertion to “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”, one decked out in pop-art colours and plastics, but equally happy to reference the Aztecs, Japanese tea ceremonies and primal colours, shapes and symbols.

Sottsass, like other Italian designers emerging in the 1960s, was ambivalent about the consumerism he was helping to give birth to. It got his products out there, but his underlying message – that objects should fulfil you – ran counter to the disposible, buy, buy, buy mentality inherent to capitalism.

Where Sottsass’s work falls down for me is its obsession with decoration and symbolism at the expense of three-dimensionality. This doesn’t make it any less resonant. His objects – cups, spoons, tables, ceramics, and, yes, some buildings – vibrate precisely because they have a painterly intensity, the epigrammatic wit of a graphic designer.

But they are objects to see – often very flat, viewed fronton, like his Memphis furniture, designed like canvases to carry decoration – rather than feel. His greatness is as provocateur, enfant terrible,catalyst: his favourite word? “Possibility.”

Asked to contribute a cover for the latest issue of Icon magazine, he returned a gnomic communiqué, two fingers to 1990s Minimalism, that hopefully won’t prove his epitaph: “You don’t save your soul just painting everything in white.” Ettore Sottsass: Work in Progress is at the Design Museum, SE1 (0870 8339955; www.designmuseum.org ), from Thurs

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