STRANGER THINGS

IN 2001, Honda unveiled a new global brand slogan, “The Power of Dreams,” through a series of commercials that eschewed the conventional portrayal of automobiles in favor of speculative meditations on the future. “What would the world be like if its favorite word wasn’t ‘OK’?” one advertisement asked. “What if the word was ‘what if’?” The work of design duo Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who established their studio Dunne & Raby in 1994, arguably revolves around this same question. While teaching at the Royal College of Art in London from 2005 to 2015, they developed the practice they called critical design—design as a form of critique—into a forum for imagining alternative realities. In their 2013 book Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, they make clear that speculative design, as it has come to be known, is not about “forecasting the future” but rather about using “what if” questions to speculate on how the present might be different. A decade on, the question is whether speculative design is merely neoliberalism’s academic cloak or a critical way of understanding the tools required for a world of finite resources.

Originally trained in industrial design and architecture, respectively, Dunne and Raby sought from the outset to explore “the gap between reality as we know it” and alternative realities suggested by their critical design proposals.¹ Speculative Everything proposes that instead of accepting a given version of reality informed by one’s surrounding media or determined by an algorithm, one could speculate as to how reality might be different and imagine the changes required to realize it. This model of design transforms products from vehicles for stimulation into props for imagining alternative ways of thinking and behaving. Dunne and Raby’s studio projects use objects to open up different social realities, “designing for worlds that don’t yet exist” in order to “dismantle existing mindsets.”² Many of their works are also collaborative. Their early project with Michael Anastassiades, “Weeds, Aliens, and Other Stories,” 1994–98, is a furniture collection for home and garden, fueled by their dissatisfaction with the limited range of psychological needs served by regular furniture. For instance, Garden Horn, 1998, allows one to speak to plants that might otherwise feel neglected, and Cricket Box, 1998, could be used to collect garden sounds, while Meeting, 1998,is a piece of indoor furniture to grow and look after. 

Other works are less ludic. After Life Euthanasia Device, 2009, which proposed using carbon dioxide for an “assisted” suicide, eerily foreshadows the Sarco Pod, a device designed to allow a person inside a sealed chamber to introduce nitrogen gas at the push of a button, recently used in a controversial Swiss assisted-suicide case. As this work suggests, Dunne and Raby often seek to provoke questions about emerging developments in science and technology, with a number of recent works using digital means to explore imaginary objects: In Search of an Impossible Object, 2018, which uses GANS (generative adversarial networks), and Meinong’s Jungle (Theory of Objects), 2015, declare their debt to Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong (1853–1920), for whom nonexistent and impossible objects were a normal part of the world. 

By interlacing their design practice with their pedagogy, the duo also have helped to unlock the academy as an instrument of social imagination. Based at the New School in New York since 2016, their Designed Realities Studio presents interdisciplinary seminars that are meant to allow participants to develop speculative thought experiments, with the aim of challenging the techno-utopian logic that drives Western design practices to reiterate broken realities. Their course “Who Comes After the Human?” (taught with cultural theorist Dominic Pettman), for instance, is intended to “create a space in which students can audition just a sample of some of the different ‘subjects’ or ‘agents’ that co-determine our future, but have until very recently been sidelined or ignored completely.”³ By carving out space between disciplines including fashion, photography, and industrial design, Dunne and Raby call into question the solutionist visions advanced by corporate futurologists, positing critical alternatives they term “parallel worlds.”⁴ 

For the artist Xin Liu, who was mentored by Raby at the New Museum’s cultural incubator, NEW INC, “speculative design has suffered in an age of clickbait where imaginative scenarios are misused as provocative ideas that stress the speculative at the expense of the critical.”⁵ Ahead of the release of their new book Not Here, Not Now (slated to be published by MIT Press this spring), Dunne and Raby argue that “the future as a concept for facilitating imaginative thought, in design, has become too restrictive.”⁶ The pair’s recent project Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival, 2023, is a case in point. Inspired by German biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the Umwelt—of a world as it is perceived by a specific organism—the resultant artifacts range between natural and machinic morphologies, implicitly decentering the human by defying canonical terms. 

The scholar Charlotte Kent recently observed that some of the most interesting art right now looks like speculative design in its deployment of hybrid media to rewire social infrastructure.⁷ Given Dunne and Raby’s efforts to untether product design from its traditional function, it should come as no surprise that many of their former students are now practicing artists. These include, among others, Marguerite Humeau, Sputniko!, Troika, Revital Cohen, Tuur Van Balen, and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. The pair’s own collaborations are often displayed in museums and galleries, from The Faraday Chair, 1995, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, which offers notional protection from electromagnetic radiation, to Designs for an Overpopulated Planet: Foragers, 2009, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which imagines border communities using synthetic biology to address food shortages. According to the design researcher Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Dunne and Raby “art-routed design from products into critical futures.”⁸ 

But by situating their speculative prototypes in gallery settings, they have also courted criticism from those who believe design should serve a more immediate social function for confining actionable proposals to insulated environments.⁹ In a particularly trenchant critique of Speculative Everything, design scholar Cameron Tonkinwise opposed the duo for essentially maintaining a modernist approach to the role of the designer.¹⁰ Certainly, their preference for using the style of neoliberal product design to critique neoliberal design leaves them open to cooption by the very markets they seek to resist. Yet this kind of ventriloquism, which camouflages the radical as marketable, has always been core to Dunne and Raby’s projects, where “[a] slight strangeness is the key—too weird and they are instantly dismissed, not strange enough and they’re absorbed into everyday reality.”¹¹ A case in point is their work United Micro Kingdoms, 2012–13, commissioned by London’s Design Museum just prior to the 20¹⁴ Scottish independence referendum. Dunne and Raby’s design proposals for different forms of transportation imagined four devolved supershires inhabited by digitarians, bioliberals, anarcho-evolutionists, and communo-nuclearists, each representing a different ideological system in a world without fossil fuel. Presented with Dunne and Raby’s characteristic industrial slickness, these utopian dystopias come freighted with the cosmetics of “radical” modernist pasts, yet what is most striking about them is how awkwardly the solutions they devise for our environmentally endangered present map onto current realities. 

Despite being trained as designers, Raby acknowledges, the duo often have been regarded as artists who take design as their subject.¹² In their 2001 book Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects, they identified a convergence of fine art, design, and business in the 1990s, crediting etoy, Mel Chin, Maywa Denki, and Liam Gillick for developing critical strategies that unsettle the relation of companies to their consumers, fulfilling a role traditionally occupied by designers. Written as a riposte to the “Hollywood genre of corporate design,” Design Noir accepted that objects typically “critical of industry’s agenda are unlikely to be funded by industry,” which is likely the reason why Dunne and Raby’s studio has always found its natural home in a university.¹³ According to one of their former students, Deborah Tchoudjinoff, what made their approach radical was that it uncoupled design from desire.¹⁴ The internet, of course, depends on desire, to the point where algorithms that mediate online experience cannot distinguish it from the truth. The artist Gretchen Andrew, for instance, has exploited this fact in two eponymous 2020 works that use a poetic form of SEO to convince Google’s image search algorithm that her desire to be on the cover of Artforum as well as to become the next American president has actually come true. Coinciding with the release of Speculative Everything, Tatiana Bazzichelli’s book Networked Disruption (2013) endorsed exactly this kind of artistic strategy that adopts a camouflage in order to “disrupt the machine by performing it.”¹⁵ The fact that Dunne and Raby were patenting this very approach in the field of design at precisely the same moment suggests that, rather than a neoliberal cloak, speculative design is in fact a disruptive camouflage with the power to rewire reality. 

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