Anthony Dunne

Fiona Raby

Beyond radical design? -- A map of unreality -- Design as critique -- Consuming monsters: big, perfect, infectious -- A methodological playground: fictional worlds and thought experiments -- Physical fictions: invitations to make believe -- Aesthetics of unreality -- Between reality and the impossible -- Speculative everything. Inhalt: Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy and consumable. In this book the concept is proposed, that design is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. Design means speculating about how things could be - to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong again and again. The "what-if" questions that are intended to open debate and discussions about the kind of future people want (and do not want).

Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

Speculative Everything

The designers explore the way we interact with electronic objects.

The Secret Life of Electronic Objects

Design Noir

"The cultural speculations and conceptual design proposals in Hertzian Tales are not utopian visions or blueprints; instead, they embody a critique of present-day practices, "mixing criticism with optimism." Six essays explore design approaches for developing the aesthetic potential of electronic products outside a commercial context."--BOOK JACKET.

Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design

Hertzian Tales

What it means to design at a time when, for many people, the future seems to have become an impossibility. When reality fails us, what can designers do? Question design’s relationship to reality, as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby do, in this exhilarating, yet thoughtful, journey to the edges of science, philosophy, and literature to find new ways of thinking about the possible—and about the meaning, function, and place of design in that speculative world of “not here, not now.” A conceptual travelogue of sorts, Not Here, Not Now brings together words, images, and objects that capture, in design form, some of the ideas encountered along the way. Itself a design experiment, the richly illustrated book explores ways to bring these ideas into conversation with objects through imagined archives, libraries, glossaries, taxonomies, lists, tales, and essays. The design responses in Not Here, Not Now—to a stone raft, for example, or a vegetable lamb, swatches of imaginary colors, a pocket universe in the home, objects undergoing space-time collapse—are, like the most compelling utopias, impossible by design, aiming instead to nourish the creative, intellectual, and imaginative ground from which new possibilities, still unknown, might begin to emerge.

Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination

Not Here, Not Now

Become Wise or Wounded is a book for the modern-day enquiring mind, revealing some of the great traps in humanity. Like all the great magic tricks, when the trick is revealed, people can never be fooled again. Through storytelling this book guides the reader in today’s present stressful society, providing tools and techniques identifying how to deal with daily tasks, coping skills, challenging beliefs, egos to self-actualise their greatness while evading the traps that hinder growth. This book of transformation gives the reader the necessary information to transform themselves from a limited being to hold the power of their true self.

Become Wise or Wounded

The first book to be published on the work of their partnership (in 2001), Design Noir is the essential primary source for understanding the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings for Dunne & Raby's work. Consisting of three elements - a 'manifesto' on the possibilities of designing with and for the 'secret life' of electronic objects; notes for an embryonic network of critical designers and, most famously, the presentation of the Placebo Project – a prototype for a critical design poetics enacted around electronic furniture-objects – Design Noir offers an in-depth exploration of one of the most seminal design projects of the last two decades, one that arguably initiated speculating through design in its contemporary forms. By detailing the logic and character of the objects that were constructed; the involvement of users with these objects over-time, and in the creation of a new kinds of spatially and temporally distributed moments of critique and engagement with things, Design Noir presents the case-study of the Placebo projectas a far more complex and subtler project than is often thought. As a bold and in many ways unprecedented experiment in design writing and book designing, Design Noir is itself an instance of the speculative propositional design it expounds.

Anthony Dunne

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