Designed by Umeda Masanori and produced by Tokyo-based manufacturer Arte Japan, the Medusa table is formed from a plate-glass top and a welded tubular steel base. In the early twentieth century, both materials had been hailed as new staples of domestic design in the industrial age, with early advocates of tubular steel often chrome plating their designs to augment the material’s strength and highly functional, industrial qualities. In Medusa, however, Umeda specifies brightly coloured finishes and distinctive zigzag and ball shapes that counter the rational modernist aesthetic with the pop inflections of postmodernism. The connotations of classical Greek myth embodied in the table’s name are characteristic of the move towards winking historical references in 1980s design.