This is a favorite design book [↓] of mine. Design Noir by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby was published in 2001. My copy is pretty beat up, well-used over any number of years. I always like the way that books with white covers inevitably show their age.



It seems appropriate given what that the book describes:

Beneath the glossy surface of official design lurks a dark and strange world driven by real human needs. A place where electronic objects co-star in a noir thriller, working with like-minded individuals to escape normalisation and ensure that even a totally manufactured environment has room for danger, adventure and transgression. We don’t think that design can ever fully anticipate the richness of this unofficial world and neither should it. But it can draw inspiration from it and develop new design approaches and roles so that as our new environment evolves, there is still scope for rich and complex human pleasure.

Dunne and Raby have worked together since 1994, with a practice that sits somewhere in the overlaps of industrial design, interaction design, and architecture. They have previously called what they do Critical Design. This is a design practice oriented explicitly in opposition to prevailing modes of design. 

The term ”Critical Design“ took off, maybe a bit too much. It was soon used for design practices which did little more than produce parodies, blind futurology, or even just entertainment. The term also became a lightning rod for those who thought it was merely art, or that it was technically impossible to critique design from within design. The debate became loud enough that Dunne and Raby maintain a “Critical Design Frequently Asked Questions” page on their website, and the Museum of Modern Art even includes a definition in their “Art terms” online database. And here a work of critical design, Robot 1, which is in the MoMA design collection [↓]:



In a more recent video interview, Fiona Raby clarifies their intent, suggesting what they offer in their work is 

Not an end point, but a counterpoint.

Continues in class . . .