Unreal by Design - PRS Australia Keynote Address by Dunne & Raby

Rather than more futures extrapolated from a faulty present, perhaps instead, we need new starting points — superpositional, entangled, analogous, and parallel worlds made concrete through the design of everyday things. Not as an escape, not as a vision of how things will or should be, but to shake off old habits, patterns and mindsets. In this talk I will draw on projects from our practice, both past and present, to explore the idea of ‘impossible objects’ in relation to the design imagination. Impossible, because they belong to different reality systems from the present one, at odds with it in ways that produce a conceptually useful wrongness. Allowing us to design from the position of what Ursula K. Le Guin has called ‘realists of a larger reality’. A reality that fully embraces the imagination and all that is yet to exist, or might never exist — what we currently think of as unreality.

Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby are partners in the design studio Dunne & Raby. They are also University Professors of Design and Social Inquiry, and Co-Directors of the Designed Realities Studio at The New School/Parsons in New York. Their books include Hertzian Tales (1998, 2006), Design Noir (2000,2021), and Speculative Everything (2013) and their design projects are in several permanent collections including MoMA in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the MAK in Vienna. In 2021, Fiona and Anthony were made Royal Designers for Industry (RDI) and Life fellows of the Royal Society of Arts (UK). In 2015, Dunne & Raby received the inaugural MIT Media Lab Award (US), and in 2009, Anthony was awarded the Sir Misha Black Award for Innovation in Design Education (UK).

www.designedrealities.org

www.dunneandraby.co.uk

Host or Publisher College of Design and Social Context - RMIT University