Design Art

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

Anthony Dunne Fiona Raby (Authors)

Kim Hwang (Advisor)

Kang Ye-jin (Translator)

2024. 1. 29. 292 pages 148×210 mm Hardcover 9791168230477 KRW 27,000

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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.

Anthony Dunne

Anthony Dunne, of Dunne & Raby, is University Professor of Design and Social Inquiry at The New School in New York and a Visiting Distinguished Professor at the China Academy of Art (CAA) in Hangzhou. Between 2005-2015 he was professor and head of the Design Interactions department/programme at the Royal College of Art in London. He studied Industrial Design at the RCA before working at Sony Design in Tokyo. On returning to London he completed a PhD in Computer Related Design at the RCA. He was a founding member of the CRD Research Studio where he worked as a Senior Research Fellow leading EU and industry funded research projects. Between 1998-2004 he was a senior tutor in Design products where he led Platform 3. Anthony was awarded the Sir Misha Black Award for Innovation in Design Education in 2009.

Fiona Raby

Fiona Raby, of Dunne & Raby, is University Professor of Design and Social Inquiry at The New School in New York and a Visiting Distinguished Professor at the China Academy of Art (CAA) in Hangzhou. She was Professor of Industrial Design (id2) at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna between 2011-2016 and was Reader in Design Interactions at the RCA between 2005-2015. She studied Architecture at the RCA before working for Kei’ichi Irie Architects in Tokyo. She also holds an MPhil in Computer Related Design from the RCA. She was a founding member of the CRD Research Studio where she worked as a Senior Research Fellow leading externally funded research projects. She taught in the Architecture department for over 13 years leading ADS 4.

Kim Hwang

Designer. He graduated from Hongik University in 2006 and worked as a UX designer at Angraphics. He then earned an MFA from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, UK, and worked as a UX Design Director at Philips Healthcare in Singapore and the Netherlands before returning to Korea to join the Department of Design at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST). He is an associate professor at UNIST, where he teaches students, founded OND Lab, conducts numerous design research and practice projects, and serves as a board member of the Korean Digital Healthcare Society. His research focuses on digital product design, service design, design strategy, and healthcare UX design, and his connections to many critical designers of his generation through his time at the RCA. His work, including CCTV Chandelier and Pizzas for the People, has been performed, exhibited, and screened in various countries, including the Barbican Center, London, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and Seoul Festival Bom. With OND Lab, he continues to think about the definition of design and seeks to expand the role of design. She strives to create positive ripples through design by adding different perspectives and exploring alternatives to the rapidly changing contemporary life.

Kang Ye-jin

She studied journalism at Yonsei University and worked in marketing and public relations in the corporate world. While pursuing her master’s program in arts management at Carnegie Mellon University, she worked for the public art team at Pittsburgh City Hall and later worked as a design strategy manager in the corporate world. She is a graduate of the Gulbab Academy and currently works as a translator for BarTranslation.

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