Design Fiction in the Science Gallery

*Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby carry on for over an hour about their practice of “critical design.” What a class act these two are: like Robert Louis Stephenson at the monster-movie festival.

*If you’re coming in late to the concept of “design fiction,” here’s the takeaway: Dunne and Raby mock-up some of the most provocative, edgy, unsettling gizmos in the world. They do this by modelling social relationships, emotional reactions and the political implications ...

of objects and services, rather than the objects and services per se. So they do create “fictions,” in that Dunne and Raby designs are poetic, objective-correlative expressions of unstable social situations. These objects are “fictions” that perform in much the way that Anthony Trollope’s 1875 social satire “The Way We Live Now” once performed.

*Somewhere over the cultural horizon, there is a modern paranormal romance where the set design and props are done by Dunne and Raby. That film would be a very Casablanca of the contemporary crisis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_We_Live_Now

(”Only Paul seems to know or care whether the railroad actually exists.” Trollope’s railroad in THE WAY WE LIVE NOW is a steampunk design-fiction of sorts.)

Hide