OK Do met Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, both designers and Royal College of Art (RCA) professors, to talk about their work at the intersection of design, art and science. We also asked them to name the 3 most interesting areas or concepts in which design and science meet. Dunne & Raby’s 1–3 list links to our forthcoming Science Poems exhibition and publication.
"We need more imagination and dreams." –Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby
Could you name 3 interesting and meaningful concepts or phenomena in which design and science meet?
Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby:
1. Ethics
2. Synthetic biology – bioethics
3. Imagination
AD: We need more imagination and dreams. All the boys of my generation had a picture of themselves in a space suit, but today, dreams have collapsed. When we ask our students about their dreams, they say “we want to save the planet”. But that’s not a dream, that’s a hope! We need new dreams that go into the 21st century, and design can be a tool to give shape to those dreams. And I’m not talking about utopia, it’s more about values – ways of existing and alternative ways of living that confront the market and the industry.
FR: Mainstream culture and media have managed to lock us into unimaginative, dogmatic, limited and conservative ways of dreaming. This is where critical design can take out another role, challenging our dreams and implying scepticism to them.
AD: As we have to consume less, why design a sustainable chair instead of not designing a new chair at all? Rather than making products and solutions that reflect the current dogma, we wish to direct design towards people’s minds and try to challenge their understanding and values. In essence, we should use design to change ourselves rather than changing the world to human needs. This means redesigning our desires, hopes, dreams and visions. We want to direct design to that part of being human, rather than trying to solve problems.
AD: But we’re not hippies. FR: Do we sound like hippies? AD: No, we don’t.