Anthony Dunne on how design research helps creating better hardware products
Here at RUKI, we’re continuing our series of interviews with people who are changing the hardware industry and have strong opinions on how to shape its future.
Recently, we spoke with the designer, scholar and teacher of The New School, Anthony Dunne. He told us about why experimental research projects can be useful for hardware developers.
Anthony Dunne is British researcher, designer and professor at The New School. He graduated from the Faculty of Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art in London and then worked for Sony in Tokyo. After returning to London, he received a Ph. D. and became a professor and director of the Design Interactions division at the RCA. Together with professor Fiona Raby, he founded the studio Dunne & Raby. Their works are featured in permanent collections of the MoMA, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), and other institutions.
Dunne and Raby are the authors of the term “critical design.” Dunn first used it in 1999 to describe a design that encourages viewers to use their imagination and offers them unusual use cases for everyday objects. Dunne and Raby argue that we can reimagine the material world and make it more functional.
The studio often focuses on the future of technologies and industrial design. For example, for the project “Not here, not now” Dunne and Raby’s students created fictional electronic devices for “Digitarians” — citizens of an imagined technocratic state. Their work “Designs for an Overpopulated Planet” offers design methods that can help solve the problem of food shortages in the future.
Please, tell us about your background. How did you start your own studio?
My background is in Industrial Design and Computer Related Design, Fiona’s is in Architecture and Computer Related Design. When we lived in Japan in the late 80s and early 90s, I worked for Sony and Fiona worked in a tiny architecture studio called Kei’ichi Irie Architects. In the evenings after finishing my work I would join them developing ideas for conceptual projects, exhibitions, and competitions. I was inspired by the breadth of work an architecture office did — private houses, public housing, teaching, writing, products, sometimes conceptual but mainly realized. We both thought this happened a lot less in design and wanted to set up a studio that would allow us to work like this.
When we returned to London, we set up Dunne & Raby while also teaching at the AA School, Barnett School of Architecture and the Royal College of Art. Over time it became apparent to us that an academic setting was the best environment for us to develop our thinking, we continued to work with industry but as academic partners rather than design consultants. This allowed us to work with their research departments and explore new thinking and ideas rather than new products.
How can critical design approach be used in hardware development? How changing perspective can make everyday objects more useful?
We are wary of using the label “critical design,” although it was a useful term to describe a particular approach to design in the early days (we first coined the term in the 90s) It can be limiting when used to describe a design style rather than suggest an activity or approach. Our interest is more in exploring how to think critically through design, and there are many ways of doing this besides critical design.
A critical design approach can be used to question what kinds of products and services we need and whether it is worth introducing a particular object into the world or not. I think this is where it would be of most value to startups — really thinking deeply about how their inventions will enrich life beyond economic growth and return on investment. And what kind of social or cultural consequences might emerge once it is introducing into daily life.
How do you describe your work today?
We are very interested in the formation of alternative worldviews to those currently driving technological development. The New School has excellent expertise in social and political theory and we are very excited about being here. We have just set up a design, teaching and research platform we have called Designed Realities Lab.
Our students are currently developing ideas for experimental micronations as a platform for exploring new perspectives on citizenship, nationality, the sovereign state, and territory in relation to emerging technologies such as AI, biotechnology and blockchain. Whole new worlds are imagined by writers, filmmakers, and artists. As designers, we can push this tendency a little further and use the results to spark different kinds of conversations about new ways of organizing society in the face of the major and inevitable changes facing humans.
Next semester we will teach a class with a philosopher that will explore new lenses on AI to see if we can move beyond stories being told by the tech industry.
What are your students doing after school if they don’t continue their research?
J. Paul Neely has a company called Yossarian which is developing an alternative search engine for creative thinking. Some pursue their research in academic settings. Sputniko!, for example, leads a group at the MIT Media Lab exploring design fiction and biotech. Others receive funding from cultural organizations to develop research projects like Thomas Thwaites’ Goat Man.
A few join companies like Apple, Google, IDEO, Adidas to bring new ways of thinking about tech into these organizations. But over the years an increasing number have set up new kinds of design studios. Superflux combines work with industry research labs, cultural organizations and local governments to explore alternative futures for emerging technology. Strange Telemetry works with the UK Government to explore new speculative design approaches to policy making. And two other recent grads have set up the London office for Japanese design firm Takram, again mixing self-initiated experimental projects about tech with client-based work.
Why did you get interested in Meinong’s taxonomy of objects? Can it be helpful for our understanding of the material world? Please, tell us about your project “Theory Of Objects”.
For an exhibition celebrating 150 years of the MAK in Vienna in 2014, designers were asked to propose a collection of objects a museum of applied arts might collect in the next 150 years. Fiona and I proposed a collection of imaginary objects invented by authors over the last 150 years, from Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward: 2000–1887” to Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake”. Each book was modified to include inserts that highlighted passages describing fictional products and displayed in a way visitors could browse through the many imaginary products.
After the exhibition, the curator proposed that our exhibit should be added to the museum’s collection. There was a big debate about whether nonexistent objects should be included. Alexius Meinong, an early twentieth century Austrian philosopher, was mentioned in the discussion. Meinong’s theory of objects, sometimes called Meinong’s Jungle, includes not only actual things, but objects that exist in literature, and the imagination, or even impossible objects.
For us, Meinong’s theory of objects offers a more complete and accurate catalog of the kinds of objects, or entities, that need to be designed today. Much of our existence is shaped by fictions and immaterial entities, yet most designers are still taught to focus on a narrow definition of reality that includes only what is actual and concrete. In the 1970s there was a slogan — “Design for the real world”, but we believe design for the “unreal world” is just as important.
Many objects in “Not here, not now” remind me of wearable devices. Did you have this trend in mind when working on the project? Who are Digitarians?
The Digitarians are a slightly exaggerated version of today’s tech consumers living in a sort of failed technological utopia. Technology’s liberating potential has vanished and they are left with highly controlling systems that reduce the human experience to a set of limited, functional interactions with, and through technology.
“Not here, not now” proposes satirical objects for the digitarians, but it also was partly a reaction against wearables. Now that the most advanced design company in the world, Apple, has reduced one of its most successful products to a two-dimensional plane, we can only go in two directions: vritualisation or a return of the third dimension. Our objects are large, cumbersome and designed for the scale of the body and the rooms they occupy; whether they are actual or virtual is intentionally unclear.
Can you tell us about the project “Designs for an Overpopulated Planet”? Why did you believe that governments and industry together would not solve the problem?
We were approached by the South African design organization Design Indaba to be part of a team commissioned by ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) to develop ideas around the theme of farming and its future for its 2009 World Conference. Design Indaba didn’t want to propose one future, but many, so each design group developed its take on the idea of farming.
According to the UN, the world is running out of food — we need to produce 70% more food in the next 40 years. We continue to overpopulate the planet, use up resources and ignore all the warning signs. It is completely unsustainable.
Governments and industry are focussed on short term goals so groups of people free to think about the long term will need to build their solutions, bottom-up. We looked at evolutionary processes and molecular technologies and how a group of people might take control of their food future. We proposed that they would extract nutritional value from non-human foods using a combination of DIY synthetic biology and new external digestive devices inspired by digestive systems of other mammals, birds, fish and insects. They would be the new urban foragers.
Have you seen any interesting startups that try to solve the problem of overpopulation and the shortage of food? Which of them do you find interesting?
I think it is a problem of beliefs, values and attitudes, rather than products or technological solutions. Once our values change, our behavior will change too, and then new realities can begin to emerge. Design can play a role in this by questioning assumptions and opening up a space that allows other possibilities to be considered, but it doesn’t have the answers. That’s a collective social and political matter.
It seems that we are experiencing a new kind of hardware revolution: thanks to 3D-printing, accessible CNC-machines and other tools it’s easier to create material objects than ever before. How, in your opinion, it’s affecting design and research?
When I was a child my father who was a carpenter gave me a small bandsaw so I could make my toys, something I enjoyed a lot. I like the idea of providing people with tools to make their own worlds rather than consuming them off the shelf. But I’m still not convinced by the rhetoric surrounding 3D printing and its promise to liberate peoples’ potential to make stuff, at least within our current economic and social arrangements. We have had sewing machines for generations yet very few people make their clothes. You still need good ideas or you just end up generating more landfill. And you need time, lots of time.
Beyond specific technologies, the challenge is to find better ways of integrating critical thinking into the process of developing new technologies and designing new products and systems that enrich life and what it means to be human, rather than reducing it.
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