I have a problem with the word post modernism  

a stab at pomo
as i understand it, postmodernism is primarily a philosophical reaction against the tenants of modernism [which seems to beg the term antimodernism].
i took just a few minutes to jot down a few terms which seem to be a part of modernist thought, and i think it would be consistent to surmise the so-called post-modern position [if there is any organization to it] to be toward the other end of the continuum.
so then, i offer my little matrix here, without the benefit of graphical enhancements:
--MODERNISM v. POSTMODERNISM--
simplicity v. complexity
restraint v. excess
function v. form
absolute v. relative
minimal v. elaborate
modest v. flamboyant
this is intentionally simple and doubtless in need of much explanation and/or refinement. but i'm interested to hear from those more schooled on the topic if it at least contributes something positive to an understanding of the postmodern aesthetic.

It is already
an historical term. " Postmodernism was" is the first thing to understand about the term. What it might mean today, a generation after its inception, is separate from what it was at the beginning: the first coherent (formal and named) reaction to modernism, a slap at the deity on the pedestal which had been around long enough to have all its secrets revealed, and its gathering chorus of nay-sayers (I'm thinking mostly of architecture, here) emboldened to the point of saying "the king has no clothes -- now."
Once the ball was rolling, many noticed, and if the products of the new movement had been really convincing, perhaps it would have lasted longer and gained a respectable place for itself -- though I don't think even then it would have permanently replaced modernism, which is simply too strong a dose of truth and beauty, too elemental and meaningful, ever to be put back in the bottle once released.
But they tried, and who can blame them. For many, the purity and self-effacing simplicity of modernism had never felt right; the sentimental and the referential were almost completely missing from the works of the modernists, and the majority found this troubling -- perhaps even threatening ? Sadly, Modern was equated with Elitist to many, I suspect.
So Postmodern needs to be assessed in "real time" -- in the sequence in which the concept and then the movement was born and fostered. The architects and designers who, almost spontaneously, initiated and then rode that particular wave, for a few years, can be looked at individually or collectively in order to understand what postmodern design was and what it meant in the context of the time. But to ask today "what does postmodern mean" without taking that trip, is to ask a question that can't be answered -- or so it seems to me.

I've allways thought a lot...
I've allways thought a lot of the ideas behind post modernism had ( past tense, I think happily most people have moved on, much like Andy Warhol its not really interesting anymore) a lot of potential, I used to like playing a design game where I would pull pieces of paper out of a container with different objects and materials written on them and try and create something with those attributes, it was artificial but stimulating, it reminds me of the solution Koen came up with for the vase, he took a lot of different ideas and syntheszed something good.
Unfortunately beauty at the hands of people like Venturi (those f&^$king chairs!) never got much of a look in.
oh well I'm glad irts time has passed!
Anyone got any good Michael Lax or Copco links? Got a mint cast iron fondue set today, actually it seems to be a sauce warmer, which is better cos any idiot can make butter sauce.

I never had a problem.....
Technically, when I first saw the Memphis stuff from the 1980's, I thought most of it looked quite weird and not at all part of the classic modern. So, the term 'post modern' was an OK term to differentiate that cutsy-poo Memphis stuff from the more architecturial stuff by Eames, Nelson, Jacobsen, Saarinen, Platner, F. Knoll, et all.
For the most part, I don't care much for a lot of this 'post modern' modern. Exceptions are the Eames Sofa (1984) and the Tizio lamp. There's other examples I like too, but I'm stuck on the Bauhaus streamline (La Corbusier, Bruer) through the post WWII Eames, Nelson, etc. stuff. It sure was a classic era of good design.
On a related note, I wish the Museum of Modern Art would put together a book of all of their "Good Design" award winners.

I think all who responded...
I think all who responded made good points .
I like the way SDR said it, HP put it good also.
but take it in a very simple term and time ,
We all know that Bill Gates/microsoft came up with the first functioning operating system for a Personal computer, or a commercial computer. (sorry Jobs )
Since that 30 plus years that original has been tweaked and re tweaked, improved and re improved, changed and re changed, to finally a completely new operating system, would this be considered post Gates/microsoft? when indeed the company is still in the real time as SDR calls it. for modernism today.

.
tizio post modern?
It is hard to define but I think a lot of po mo stuff tried to tell a story, with either redundant protrusions or aspects of the design which had a double function, be it a popular, historical or intellectual one. Alessi obviously comes to mind.
But of course I don't need to chuckle at a birdy on my kettle at 7 am.

I prefer
to use the term only to refer to the early and specific Postmodern designs. I don't believe it helps to call any modernist designs produced today "postmodern" -- even if that seems chronologically appropriate. Using the same term to refer to two very different things is never an aid to discussion and enlightenment -- is it ?
Of course, the waters are also muddied by the fact that different designers play different games during any one period. Thus, there have always been significant designs being produced that were not "pure" modern -- and today there is a different kind of modernism paralleling the purest form, still pursued (and with increasing vigor ?) by many. But let's find another term for that than "postmodern" !

On PM...
Intellectually, PM tried to put the complexity and contradiction, as well as the history and eclecticism, and the sincere irony and playful amusement back in architecture, as Venturi's seminal book makes quite clear, all the things Modernists had removed from functionalist and pre functionalist architecture.
Read Venturi's book and you cannot avoid understanding exactly what postmodernists "thought" they should try to do.
But movements pack not only a rational intellectual intent, but an intrinsic sensibility of their time, a sensibility they are not always able themselves to articulate. Modernism came along at a time when the avant garde believe civilization was botched, broken by WWI, and needed saving. It proposed a radical surgery. Denude functionalism of ornament and all historical reference, all contradiction, all surface complexity. Embrace the new materials and means of productions and dump the class and political and aesthetic ideologies that yielded the old architecture. Make a complete brace with a murderous past by whatever means necessary, up to and including fascism. The human being was to be provided for, not indulged. Human spirituality was to subordinate to the reason of the specialists. It was time to embrace the machine and mass production, as an architect, or perish under its operation by lessers.

Pt2
PM's intrinsic sensibility was a product of great prosperity, the triumph of mass market materialism, the high point of individual freedom and democracy looking back, and yet an abiding fear of mutually assured nuclear destruction, and a sense that all the indeologies of the 20th Century, both those that prevailed and those that were crushed, all failed to live up to expectations. In short PM was born in a time when there material needs were met, the status quo seemed secure, but it could all be gone in the blink of an eye. Do you see the irony? Do you see the fatigue with the severity and urgency of modernism? Do you understand people's inherit, though often repressed or deferred desire to have a good time, some levity, some fun? Do you understand that just as persons get war weary and want bounty, as they did soon after WWII, they can also get Cold War Weary, and want diversion from a circumstance the does not seemly likely to change for a very long time. People were ready to be diverted by architecture and the arts. They were ready to be amused by them. After a generation of leaders is assassinated and one has lived most of one's life under a black umbrella of nuclear annihilation that all the protest movements and all the voting and all the weapons building has not been able to alleviate, do you understand the need for comedy? And do you understand the wish to find some historical continuity and connection in a time that seems so utterly disconnnected from history by nuclear weapons and twin super powers with completely opposing indeologies and raw and exposed class and racial hatreds? If we can't solve any problems, can't we at least reconnect with our heritages some how to ease the age of underlying angst?
PM gave us all this with a tongue in cheek awareness that any ideology, even its own was an act of black irony in the face of the abject failure of all ideologies up to that point. PM was honest enough to admit that when we go looking in the past for a new present that we can take from the past, but that that to is a kind of cultural sacking of the past. We are different. No matter how much we love Florence, we cannot copy it. And to embrace its complexity and contradiction without recognizing the mass market crassness of our time is disingenuous. Hence, PM embraced sincere irony. We know this is bogus, but we mean it as much as you can mean something bogus.
But again something less self conscious came along with PM.
It was an abandonment of space and neutral bouyancy of structures and an embrace of surface and weight and groundedness, as Arthur Erickson made clear later during the PM high tide.

Pt3
PM was modernist form language with ironic historical ornament added, but something had changed. PM did not, probably could not, believe in the ideology of space as an ideal, of neutral bouyancy as a desirable illusion. PM implied that was all bogus too. A wall is a wall. A room is a room. Buildings sit on the ground. Gravity is real. Gravity's rainbow is real. Civilization is not rising to some magnificient peak of enlightenment and beauty. It is clumsily amass in mass material goods and descending into a mass crassness that no one can reverse--that one can only accept and make the best of, just as modernist before them had accepted and made the best of the mass crassness of the rise of the machine.
PM was a historical revivalism by persons who believed neither in the virtue of the past, nor the potential for virtue in the present. They believed that the best humans could hope for from their art and architecture was some diverting complexity and contradiction, some ironic wit and amusement. Mankind was way past salvation, or aspiring to true greatness. Inauthenticity beautifully realized was the coin of the new realm. The secular had the spiritual. Doubt had triumphed over confidence, skepticism over animal faith and/or theocratic faith. America was more like a plastic Florence than a real Florence and a historical revival of Florentine complexity and contradiction in America should reflect the fakeness of it all.
And yet under the cynical surface of sincere irony of PM, there really was a humanist core. They really did believe and act as if it were time to try to give the people some relief from modernist austerity and severity supremecacy. They did believe in amusement and a good laugh or two. They did admit and embrace the near hallucinogenic absurdities of late 20th Century life. They may have given the public back the Greco-Roman parapets and the Functionalist's essentially contentless, and so spiritually meaningless ornamentation, but they did not lie to them and say that it was authentic. They did not tell them that their new -ism could save and change the world. They did not tell the public to bend over and grab their ankles and say, "thank you madam dominatrix, give me another whack of modernism, please." They reintroduced pastels and figurative painting. They reintroduce ornamented light fixtures and surface patterns with a complexity unseen since Frank Lloyd Wright was laughed out of the Mid Century Modern club house for trying to revive and/or perpetuate the kind of ornament that his Functionalist mentor Louis Sullivan showed could be so lovely and comforting amidst the ascent of rational function.

Pt4
Like all movement, PM cannot be viewed all one way or another. It had some good and some bad intentions and results. On the whole I don't like it as much as Modernist work, but as I get older and continue to see the repetition of failed ideologies starving, torturing and killing millions in my world, a part of me is grateful that Venturi and some others were brave enough hold a mirror up to the world, and say, "look, here, you aren't as pretty as you think you are, and you're vastly more decadent than you think you are, and crasssness is overabundant, but life not all disaster and foolish intentions run amock; there is also memory, and wit and the will not to be sucked in by those selling ideologies like the next TRUE salvation that will not be.
We keep thinking and writing about PM, because it was profound. Not profoundly worked out, or rigorously grounded in philosophy, but profound in what it took to be self evident about the human condition under the brunt of recurring failed ideologies. PM was the comic mask, to counter the tragic mask of Modernism. In literature, both comedy and tragedy have their places and are respected, even if tragedy holds a slightly more exhalted standing. I suspect in time the same will be hold true in architecture and design.

Chuckle at a birdy on my kettle
Well that pretty much sez it for me. I find that kind of cutesy, whimsical decoration to be irritating. I want the form itself to be the decoration. In fact the word 'whimsical' when applied to design and architecture will cause me to cringe spasmodically every time.
Postmodernism grates on my nerves, mid-century modernism has the opposing effect. The resurgence of a nature-inspired, purely simple design aesthetic makes me shout hurrah!
Shall we call it 'new modernism' ?

thank you madam dominatrix, give me another whack of modernism, please.
I want this on a tee shirt...

Well then
I shall go polish my leather