In
Personalities
, people open doors into their very personal immediate surroundings: their homes and spaces of creative work. As different as they are, what connects them is something special: the elegant, simple and minimalist USM modular furniture system, created in 1961 in Switzerland and now widely considered a design classic. The volume offers a journey into the worlds of these people, letting them tell the stories behind the pieces of furniture—each one as individual as its owner. While the stories constitute the heart of
, well-known specialist authors supplement the text with explorations of material culture and lifestyle. The diversity of those portrayed is reflected in the variety of the accompanying essays, which play with concepts of personality and furniture product design. The resulting volume is a visual feast of the iconic, flexible furniture system that defined postwar industrialist design seen in a variety of contexts.