Speculative Everything : Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
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Description
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.
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Product details
- Hardback | 240 pages
- 178 x 229 x 19mm | 758g
- 30 Mar 2016
- MIT Press Ltd
- Mit Press
- Cambridge, United States
- English
- 143 color illus.; 286 Illustrations, unspecified
- 0262019841
- 9780262019842
- 7,926
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Review Text
Speculative Everything neatly and quietly dispels the myths, misunderstandings and simplifications surrounding speculative design. Of course, there will always be people who dismiss Dunne and Raby's work for being too arty, and, well, too speculative to be strictly design but if some of them ever read the book, i'm quite convinced that they will at least agree on the fact that its authors ask some valid questions and more importantly perhaps articulate them in an intelligent, compelling way.
We Make Money Not Art
In conclusion, something should be said about how refined and handsome this book is, as a designed artifact. Though it's a work for the academy and not for the coffee-table, it deliberately upholds a high standard. All the illustrations, and there are many, are in crisp resolution, while starkly obvious pains have been taken to see that due credit was given to every creative person involved in every image. It's the polar opposite of the carefree, slobbering virality of Youtube, Tumblr, and this weblog, and there's something heart-lifting in its living demonstration of what can be achieved today. Not tomorrow, and not in the imagination but really, right here and now.
Bruce Sterling, Beyond the Beyond
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Review quote
Speculative Everything neatly and quietly dispels the myths, misunderstandings and simplifications surrounding speculative design. Of course, there will always be people who dismiss Dunne and Raby's work for being too arty, and, well, too speculative to be strictly design but if some of them ever read the book, i'm quite convinced that they will at least agree on the fact that its authors ask some valid questions and more importantly perhaps articulate them in an intelligent, compelling way.--We Make Money Not Art--
In conclusion, something should be said about how refined and handsome this book is, as a designed artifact. Though it's a work for the academy and not for the coffee-table, it deliberately upholds a high standard. All the illustrations, and there are many, are in crisp resolution, while starkly obvious pains have been taken to see that due credit was given to every creative person involved in every image. It's the polar opposite of the carefree, slobbering virality of Youtube, Tumblr, and this weblog, and there's something heart-lifting in its living demonstration of what can be achieved today. Not tomorrow, and not in the imagination--but really, right here and now.--Bruce Sterling, Beyond the Beyond--
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About Anthony Dunne
Fiona Raby is Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, and Reader in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art.
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