It took me all August to find this, but I'm in the tall weeds in the Balkan mountains
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are University Professors of Design and Social Inquiry at The New School / Parsons in New York where they co-direct the Designed Realities Studio. They are also partners in the design studio Dunne & Raby. Between 2005-2015 Anthony was professor and head of the Design Interactions programme at the Royal College of Art in London. Fiona was professor of Industrial Design (Studio-id2) at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 2011-2016, and between 2005-2015 she was Reader in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art.
Anthony is the author of Hertzian Tales (MIT Press, 2005), and with Fiona Raby, Design Noir (will be republished in 2019), and Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming (MIT Press, 2013). Their work is in several museum collections including MoMA in New York, the V&A in London, and the MAK in Vienna.
Anthony was awarded the Sir Misha Black Award for Innovation in Design Education in 2009, and in 2015, Dunne & Raby received an MIT Media Lab Award.
We are living in complicated times, politically, environmentally, culturally… After 20 years of Speculative and Critical Design do you think that it can have a more influential role in shaping futures/alternatives beyond the discussions that typically take place in the design community?
These days I’m a little wary of using labels which although helpful in the early days, mainly to focus discussion, eventually hold back new ideas and thinking. I prefer to think more broadly about critical forms of design practice, or speculative forms of design practice. They allow more room for different approaches and new ideas to emerge.
As we’ve often discussed, speculation has a long history in design, think of concept cars for example, but it was used mainly to sell new ideas and future technologies to consumers. One of the things we were trying to do in DI was to relocate this way of designing from a strictly commercial context into one where it could be used for other purposes – exploring potential implications for emerging technology for example. In this context, I’m not sure it was ever about “shaping” futures, at least not directly, but more about raising awareness, or concerns.
Many of the problems facing us today are political in nature and far beyond the scope of design, despite its claims. Speculative and Critical Design practices do have a role to play, but designers need to recognise their limitations and work with them.
Do you think that the formation of dystopian imaginaries has become a dominant approach in Speculative Design? Does this distract from the need to imagine more positive futures?
No, not at all. I see many different stances being taken by students today. The most interesting ones avoid being either utopian or dystopian and instead present dilemmas and tradeoffs, they’re far more ambiguous and nuanced. But dystopian projects always seem to get more air time.
Interestingly, in our teaching, we’re finding that the future as a concept for facilitating imaginative thought is just too restrictive. As others have remarked, the future has long been colonised by the technological dreams of industry, and even its aesthetics and forms of representation have ceased to evolve. In our classes we’re trying to move beyond using the future as a framing device for ideas that do not belong in the here-and-now, and beginning to explore other ways of framing and thinking about alternative possibilities, worlds, realities… And to take more seriously how they are represented aesthetically which far too often is overlooked, leading to hackneyed results that just wash over people. This kind of work needs to resonate with people if they are to fully engage with it so we’re experimenting again with estrangement, subtle forms of absurdity, and wrongness....
