How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures.
Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of 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. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want).
Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more―about everything―reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

Computers & Technology

Dunne, Anthony

Raby, Fiona

Games & Strategy Guides

The MIT Press

Speculative Everything, With a new preface by the authors: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

Computer Science

About the Author Clive Dilnot is professor of Design Studies at Parsons The New School for Design, New York, USA. Recent publications include Ethics? Design? (2005) and the text for Chris Killip: Pirelli Work (2007).Eduardo Staszowski is associate professor of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design, and Director of the Parsons DESIS Lab, New York, USA. He is the co-editor of the Designing in Dark Times series and of the book Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (Bloomsbury 2020). Product Description 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. Review “Like a trap door to a room we didn't know existed, Design Noir opened up a space for a critical design practice that was wholly unexplored in its time. Today, that space seems not only obvious and essential, but inevitable. The impact of Design Noir has been inestimable. And the aftershocks from this unassuming but masterful book are still reverberating decades later.” ―Jamer Hunt, Vice Provost for Transdisciplinary Initiatives at The New School, USA and Associate Professor of Transdisciplinary Design, Parsons, USA“Only now that speculation through design has come into its own can we see the full legacy of this mischievous and engaging book. Its welcome reappearance shows it remains both a crucial study in material critique and a lesson in how to document the thoughts of your participants. ” ―Ann Light, Professor of Design and Creative Technology at the University of Sussex and Professor of Interaction Design, Social Change and Sustainability at Malmo University, Sweden

Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (Radical Thinkers in Design, 2)

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Bloomsbury Visual Arts

Conventions In Contemporary Art arose from the highly entertaining and much-discussed series of debates organized by Witte de With in 2001. Without lapsing into dull theoryspeak, it explores and questions the routines and fashions that dominate the art world today. Catherine David and Iwona Blazwick explore the curator's heightened profile; Jeroen Boomgaard and Koen Brams tackle theory and art; Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby question the relationship between design and art; Bart Lootsma and Camiel van Winkel look at art in public spaces; and Janneke Wesseling and Kitty Zijlmans discuss the position of non-western art in the western world.

Conventions in Contemporary Art: Lectures and Debates Witte de With 2001

Arts & Photography

Lootsma, Bart

van Winkel, Camiel

Zijlmans, Kitty

Van Der Plas, Els

Murray, Alan.

Thissen, Siebe

Wesseling, Janneke

Brams, Koen

Huygens, Charlotte

History & Criticism

Witte de With Publishers

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