A collaborative practice
Anthony Dunne is a critical designer and educator who runs Dunne & Raby with Fiona Raby. Their collaboration includes Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects and Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming. These publications sit alongside a shared design practice. Design Noir was published by Birkhäuser in 2001, and Speculative Everything by The MIT Press in 2013. An earlier book by the pair, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, was published by The MIT Press in 1999.
Writing and teaching
Dunne worked in the Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions department before moving to New York in 2015 to teach at The New School. His post at the Royal College of Art was reader, held from 2005 to 2015. In New York he took up professorships in Design and Emerging Technologies at The New School. His career offers several connected ways into critical design: a studio partnership, published arguments and education.
A useful starting point
Begin with a particular project and the writing that accompanies it. Ask how the designed proposal makes a question concrete, then consider what the prose adds to that encounter. The books can introduce the terms of the discussion, but they should not stand in for an examination of the collaborative work. Keeping Raby’s contribution in view also gives a more accurate account of how this practice developed.
