Portrait of Paola Antonelli.

How does curating design differ from curating art?

There are a lot of differences. My art colleagues tend to do more monographic shows that have a different approach than the thematic shows that I favour. The reason for the thematic focus might be that I have more to prove and explain. Design is currently not treated as an art in its own right and it has to fight for its own presence and relevance in culture. Another important difference is that art curators often have a lot of reverence for artists – what they say and do is considered almost a religion. Designers, on the other hand, are usually working for a client and used to being questioned and negotiated with. That makes the curating different.

Working at the intersection of design, art and science, we’d like to hear how you see the future relationship between the three.

At the time of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition we were not the first ones to make design and science meet but maybe the first ones to make a full-fledged show about it. The Royal College of Art and Wellcome Trust in London have been exploring the intersection for a long time and the interesting and beautiful thing about their approach is that nobody makes a distinction between art and design in this context. One of the things I learned when making Design and the Elastic Mind was that the disctinctions between design, art and science become insignificant when you try to come up with new ideas that haven’t been proven or that don’t have a functionality yet.

The role of art – as it is generally seen – is to question our beliefs and habits. When you want to do that with design you need to use the means of art, like many pieces in Design and the Elastic Mind did. However, at the same time, every single work in the show had a design intention and soul to it. It’s hard to say what’s the difference between art and design – and it certainly cannot be built on form. You rather have to go back to the intent of the artist or designer. An artist is free to choose whether to be responsible towards the society or not – where as designers, by definition, are always trying to make things better. Overall, I think that one of the main roles of MoMA and myself is to give people who are doing meaningful things a platform and a sense of validation.

“An artist is free to choose whether to be responsible towards the society or not – where as designers, by definition, are always trying to make things better.”

In our interview with Anthony Dunne, he said that art shouldn’t need to exist. His reason was that in an ideal, utopian world; everyday life would be so rich, meaningful and challenging that we wouldn’t need a separate category called art. “I kind of feel that art exists because design has failed,” he noted. What are your thoughts on this argument?

Haha, it’s a very extreme argument which I love and completely understand! It comes from the same militant spirit that I have here at MoMA – as representatives of design we have so much to prove. I’m very glad that Tony [Anthony Dunne] is taking this stance because we need to make more outrageous statements to make people think.

Like you write in Seed magazine, as the focus of design shifts from the production of finite goods to a practice of experimentation, ideas take precedence over products. How will this effect the role of designers?

I think this phenomenon expands the field of action for designers. Instead of being hired to manufacture products, designers might be hired to help the company think. I feel that Tony and Fiona [Dunne and Raby] are sometimes commissioned to be a thorn in the company’s side; to make them more aware of the consequences of their actions. I hope more designers will do that in the future, when people start understanding that design is not only about chairs and lamps. Designers can also work with politicians and policy-makers – many of them have the ability to be thinkers on a general level.

“I hope that more designers wiIl be hired by companies to be thorns in their sides; to make them think and be more responsible.”

We feel that the university didn’t exactly prepare us for what we’re doing now with OK Do. How do you think designers as general thinkers should be educated?

This is an interesting question because education is the most important moment for designers these days and the geography of design is completely defined by where the good design schools are and nothing else. Nowadays, many succesful design schools already lead a more holistic approach offering studies in subjects like anthropology, and sociology.

When I studied architecture in Politecnico di Milano I loved a course in technology by Professor Guido Nardi. On Tuesdays, he would talk with us about how steel, wood and other materials behave, but Fridays were dedicated to Jung, Heidegger and Adorno. In a way, there was a balance between cold and hot showers; between teachings in pure application of materials and pure abstraction of theory. I found this balance extremely important and would use the course as a model for schools today.

Nowadays, many design schools are actually focusing a lot on the theoretical side and there are so many academic design courses coming up, like design cricism, interaction design, transdisciplinary design, etc. This is great, but I also wonder if any of these students ever go to workshops and cut themselves while carving wood.

You have stated that design is a bridge between the abstraction of research and the tangible requirements of real life, and that designers stand between revolutions and everyday life. Could you mention examples of projects in which you feel design has functioned particularly well as a bridge?

There are many, of course. Designers can satisfy our human needs by making a technological innovation usable and exciting for us. The next exhibition I’m going to do at MoMA is about the communication between people and objects – it’s called Talk to Me. The first time I personally understood this concept was when I bought my first Macintosh. It was the first time I felt that I had a pet. And this is what designers really do: they make objects into something that is part of your life. In fact, nowadays one of the most important functions of objects is to enable people to access networks. That makes the interfaces of objects and the ways they interact even more important.

“Nowadays one of the most important functions of objects is to enable people to access networks.”

What kind of roles do functionality and aesthetics play in the process of translating scientific revolutions into approachable objects? What about in the end results?

Aesthetics is important as a means of communication but never by itself. There’s scientific research that says that handsome people get higher wages. It’s kind of unfair, but there is a role in our natural evolution played by beauty. On the other hand, we know very well that beauty is completely subjective and if you look at examples like Almodóvar’s movies or punk aesthetics, they might not be pretty in an obvious way, yet they are beautiful because of the personality inside.

Designers can help scientists master complexity and take advantage of new building blocks like nanotechnology for instance, but what about their ability to dream – do you think designers’ fantasies can and should get involved in scientific processes and, later, the reality?

Sometimes artists and designers and other creative professionals like science fiction writers or filmmakers inspire scientists big time and push them further, even if they don’t admit to it that much. I’m currently collaborating with a sci-fi director on a symposium about science fiction, architecture and design. We feel that almost everything that has been imagined by architects, designers and science-fiction writers in the past has actually been realised, and the question is: what could we imagine next?

What do you think is the designers’ role and responsibility in thinking about the (sometimes negative) consequences of scientific discoveries?

There’s a lot of morality in design. Sometimes moralism also, but often constructive criticism. Scientists are also very concerned with ethics and what their accomplishments are used for. I think that the more communication there is between designers and scientists, the more the ethical agendas will become a general practice that everybody takes on. Many scientists today are so different from the scientists we used to know in the past. They listen to music, they make mistakes and they think in terms of ethical responsibility.

“The more communication there is between designers and scientists, the more the ethical agendas will become a general practice that everybody takes on.”

The Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition was not concerned only with designers who have an interest in the latest scientific achievements, but also with scientists who are engaged in the act of design. Could you give us your favourite example of the latter kind of cases? And do you think it’s necessary to draw lines between professional designers and other people who practice design?

Certainly different people have different expertise and I would never put a designer in the lead of cancer research just as I wouldn’t let scientists design my mobile. It’s the communication between different fields and professionals that counts. One of my favourite works in the exhibition, ‘Colloidal Alphabet Soup’ was a new protein marker by two biologists from UCLA, Thomas Mason and Carlos Hernandez. Usually protein markers just feature different colours, but they also used the alphabet to mark the proteins in more detail. In the exhibition, they showed their work through a poster where an image of this colourful ‘alphabet soup’ was magnified. Next to their work, we exhibited a fictional piece, ‘Typosperma’ by designer Oded Ezer who had imagined that each spermatozoon of a man would have a letter attached to it with each ejaculation resulting in a new poem. The scientists were so happy to exhibit next to the designer, to not to be considered dull scientists but rather people who are creative too!

Science poems, literally speaking [haha]. So, you would say that design can produce culture, or experiences, around scientific discoveries?

Yes. A good example at Design and the Elastic Mind was a living coat called “Victimless Leather” by SymbioticA. It was made of living stem cells from mice and it had to be fed to be kept alive. It was constantly growing, finally to an extent at which I had to kill it by blocking the nutrient. I was so disturbed by having to do this and the act resulted in a big debate about killing the completely artificial yet living coat. This example demonstrates how art can take a stand in innovation and transform it into a project, it can really make you feel insecure about everything you thought we were steady and neutral about.

Victimless Leather - A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific "Body", 2004. Image courtesy of the Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr).

In our Science Poems exhibition, we have given designers and artists the brief to explore and interpret natural sciences. What do you think is the meaning and value of letting creative professionals interpret scientific questions, processes and results?

Do you have scientists checking out your work and making sure it’s exact?

The scientists will be more in the background, giving information and starting points, rather than actually getting involved in the art work which is based on interpretation and imagination.

What is important, I think, is to have scientists criticising the work in the end, to give their opinion about the direction the interpretation is taking. A beautiful example of an artist and a scientist collaborating this way is that of the artist Matthew Ritchie and physicist Paul Steinhard. I think it’s important to show people working together and not apart. But if the artists are free to do whatever they want, this should be explained clearly on the label.

To sum it up, could you name the 3 the most interesting or meaningful concepts or phenomena in which design/art and science meet?

1. Synthetic biology is important. The idea that you can make organisms out of composing bricks.
2. Nanotechnology – designers are paramount there.
3. Visualisation design – designers helping scientists to make sense of their data.

Here and there – Satoko and Kok-Meng's office mixes inside and outside spaces.

Thanks for inviting us over! How did you end up in Shanghai?

Satoko Saeki: I first came to China in 2000 for an internship, as a result of studying architecture under the guidance of a Chinese professor in Pennsylvania. Having lived in Tokyo and New York, I immediately felt that China was different. I was not interested in its architectural scene but more the atmosphere. Instead of being established and “ready”, there was an air of dynamism and potential – something was about to happen.

Kok-Meng Tan: I came in the end of 2003 to work on a large conservation project in the former French Concession. Then I met Satoko in a café where we both used to hang out. She had started her own practice a little earlier and asked me to join her.

Which café was that?

SS: It was a small casual café called Le Petite, run by our Japanese friend Noriko. Since then, she has made the place more private and moved it to her home. She used to work as a designer for Muji and has lived in Shanghai for many years. I can call Noriko if you would like to visit her.

We would, thanks (see the interview with Noriko)! Could you tell us about your design approach?

KMT: We are not interested in the kind of design that is currently hyped all over. We rather believe in the genres of “under design” (design that falls below conventional contemporary design as deemed too simple or too banal) “super design” (design that exceeds the conventional because it may be too extreme, too personal or just useless) and “non-design” (functional and straightforward items and ideas that were developed before the advent of “design”).

SS: We are also interested in creating experiences and affecting behaviour in spaces instead of designing expressive buildings.

“We believe in the genres of under design, super design and non-design.”

What kinds of projects do you carry out?

SS: We mainly do interiors and small-scale architecture because, as foreigners, it’s difficult for us to get hold of bigger development projects.

KMT: Lately, we’ve been working on a small housing project for two families based on the ideas of sharing and interconnection.

SS: The project is called Minus K House. In Japan, homes are often described as 3LDK (3 x Living Dining Kitchen rooms) or 4LDK, etc. But for these two houses, the kitchen is shared, and therefore not fully a K. In practice, all the 19 rooms of 3 x 3 square metres also function as passages: to move around the building, you need to pass from one room to another, and there are many ways to experience the house. One of the families uses their part of the building as a weekend house and the other part is used as a regular home. The openness allows each family to be aware of the other.

KMT: In the Minus K House, we also wanted to mix inside and outside spaces – to make the whole concept of ‘inside and outside’ insignificant so that the relationships between this and that, and here and there would become more important. When this happens, the walls become less important, even unnoticed, emphasising a communality in the space.

KUU is working on interiors and small-scale architecture for sharing and interconnection.

We definitely feel that Chinese culture is more inclined to sharing than our own. Could you tell us more about your view on the concept of sharing in Chinese architecture?

SS: After the Communist Liberation in 1949, families typically had to share their bathrooms and kitchens with others. This was not very convenient but people got used to it. Nowadays, Chinese people are wealthier, but through urbanisation, like in most of the other big cities, people have to move to tower blocks which diminish communality. We wish to bring the concept of sharing back to Chinese architecture, but in a more comfortable way than before.

KMT: We think that sharing, or the presence and recognition of somebody else, makes people more in touch with reality. In our office, a partially roofless space built in the 1930s for residential use, we can smell the cooking of our neighbours, see their underwear drying, and hear them chatting. We really like the setting because it reminds us that we are working in a real context, mixing the inside and outside spaces together.

“We wish to bring the concept of sharing back to Chinese architecture, but in a more comfortable way than before.”

How do you find clients and collaborators?

KMT: In China, everything happens through the people you know. Satoko just visited a really nice indigo dyeing workshop outside Shanghai which we found through Noriko.

SS: It’s a workshop run by a 75-year-old couple who use natural indigo and cotton and dye everything by hand. In fact, China is a great place for a designer exactly because of this: the craftsmen and manufacturers are near and it’s possible to work with them closely.

KMT: Basically, you can just make a drawing and take it to the product-makers yourself. In Japan and Singapore, we usually use catalogues for picking up construction material for our projects while in China we can work in close collaboration with the makers themselves.

You’ve also taught at the Shenzhen University’s architecture department as guest studio masters.

KMT: Yes, last year, we carried out a design studio called Shenzhen Super Stir with our students who were encouraged to give modern architecture a proper stir through a series of exercises. We asked them to rethink the idea of “clarity” – a common architectural notion that has been inherited from the early European modernists. The idea was to ask if an estrangement from clarity or definition could inspire us to new thinking about privacy, communality and boundaries – and ultimately to new kind of architecture.

What did the students think about the stirring?

KMT: The students seemed resistant at first, they wanted to make new things. In China, traditionally, students are taught to create form – and if the project doesn’t involve creating new form then the results are not considered new. We wanted to make the students see the value in designing new experiences, too.

SS: We also wanted them to experiment how cities might become interesting and more functional through the “misuse” of space. In the end, the students came up with great ideas for an old industrial block where spaces with different functions, such as education or trade, overlapped encouraging sharing and interaction.

Like you’ve discussed in your writing, in the West, people are also obsessed with new forms.

KMT: Yes, according to François Jullien, a French Sinologist (The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting), this has to do with the foundations of Western, in other words Greek, thinking where something conceptual or abstract always has to be manifested as something else – a presence of “this” means the existence of “that”. In traditional non-Greek thinking, such as the Chinese, there is no obsession with presence. Whether something is present or not is never asked, because it’s not part of the question. Presence and non-presence, form and formlessness, good and bad, past and present, big and small, you and me, and here and there all exist in the same dynamic continuum. According to the non-Greek logic, we shouldn’t even ask questions about form or non-form – it’s not about one or the other but they come from the same pre-differentiated source.

“In traditional Chinese thinking, presence and non-presence, form and formlessness, good and bad, past and present, big and small, you and me, and here and there all exist in the same dynamic continuum.”

How do you see the current mindset of creative professionals in China?

KMT: When we first came to China, there was understandably no layers – no historical thinking or understanding behind architecture and design. The work and discussions were either stuck in Chinese traditions or random references picked from the Western world – and these ideas carried no meaning, they were not progressive. But then things started to change rapidly.

SS: In the last ten years, big money entered China and there was a lot of development, a lot of big projects. But at the same time, more subtle cultural things developed, too. Chinese people started opening cafés with unique local character. Before, people always referred to foreign examples, but the younger generation has gained confidence – they look at their own culture, society and roots and take ideas from them to the modern context.

KMT: I think that many Chinese creative people feel like they don’t need to live in the West anymore. They’re making meaningful things in their own context and recognising their own environment as authentic. This is great because, in the end, people want real things. The fact that people are starting to be their own selves in China is a good starting point for newness.

Kok-Meng and Satoko's office is a partially roofless space built in the 1930s for residential use.

We agree, and it is interesting to see how many contrasting ways of living and working seem to co-exist, for instance, in Shanghai. It’s not so settled yet.

SS: Yes, many people live in a modern way familiar from Western contexts while many neighbourhoods also hold on to the old spirit of sharing and porosity.

KMT: We’re attentive to the behaviour of people in Shanghai – how they behave in different environments, at different times and with different types of people. Things are in a fuzzy and seemingly contradictory state. For example, Shanghainese interact with their family, colleagues, and shopkeepers in a very natural way, but at the same time they formalise their homes into abstract symbols of social status and taste. Our young clients don’t cook, but they still want a designer kitchen. They will move out in three years time, yet they worry about radiation from the marble. We need to understand this phenomenon in order to work with it.

Could you name some other things that interest or inspire you about China at the moment?

SS: Well, we’re interested in traditional Chinese landscape painting: how the use of ink on paper, a single simple medium, can create a world of many things based on gradations of tonalities, densities, dryness and wetness, becoming present and fading away, hazy and distinct, here and there, this and that. In the paintings, we can sense an atmosphere of an all encompassing world before things became differentiated.

"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.

Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne at their London home office.

Working somewhere in between art and science, you aim to generate discussion about the relationship between technology and people. How would you define the role and purpose of design? And how do you define critical design?

AD: The question of art and design is problematic. A lot of people want to see us as artists, but we definitely see ourselves as designers trying to push the discipline forward, asking questions about design and through it. In fact, we launched the term critical design ten years ago in order to describe our work. Sometimes people think it simply means criticism; that we are negative about everything, anti-consumerist and against design. Some people relate it to critical theory; to Frankfurt school and anti-capitalist thinking. We are definitely aware of it, but then again not in that category either. Critical design is about critical thinking – about not taking things at face value. It’s about questioning things, and trying to understand what’s behind them. In essence, our objective is to use design as a means for applying skepticism to society at large.

a/b – "a sort of a manifesto that positions what we do in relation to how most people understand design" by Dunne and Raby. Typography by OK Do.

You have compared design to art, using film and literature as examples of genres that are critical yet create pleasure. What do you think design and art can learn from each other?

AD: I think that art shouldn’t need to exist. In an ideal, utopian world, everyday life would be so rich, meaningful and challenging that we wouldn’t need this separate category called art. I kind of feel that art exists because design has failed. Learning from artists, designers should become bolder, more imaginative and critical. I’m not sure if art needs to learn from design, though.

“I kind of feel that art exists because design has failed.”

Having talked about “the aesthetics of use” in your work, how would you compare this to the traditional notion of aesthetics? And how do you think the role of aesthetics changes from art to design?

AD: Rather than considering aesthetics only from a visual point of view, we are interested in the aesthetics – the poetry – of experience when interacting with products. A good example of this is the Truth Phone which can generate an adventure through a voice stress analyser revealing if the person you’re talking with is lying. I think that the best experiences bust out from their medium. This applies to art and literature, and it should apply to design, too.

In your books, you also mention placebo projects and the engineering of poetic products. Could you open up these concepts a little bit?

AD: The placebo effect is based on the idea that, instead of changing reality, the perception of reality is changed. This also relates to the idea of designing “poetic” products that modify our perception of and relationship with life. Our aim is to activate the imagination and to juxtapose poetic design and ways of thinking with the more traditional problem solving approach. We are interested in questions like why does art have to be separated from everyday life, or why can’t objects generate philosophical experiences on a daily basis?

We think that your work shows interest towards the invisible but also the unexplained. Do you agree? What do you feel is the importance of exploring the unreal in addition to the real?

AD: Yes. As a student I became interested in the aesthetic possibilities of electronic objects. In the early 90s, designers were still thinking of them as typical objects that just needed to have a nice shape and a convenient choice of materials. Through research, we discovered that electronic objects are special in that they transmit and are surrounded by electromagnetic fields which are invisible yet concrete. We thought: why not design products that draw attention to these fields in a poetic way – in a way that inspires people? In general, our work is considered unreal by many. But how do you define reality? Do real products need to be mass-produced and sold in a shop? The relationship between “real-real” and “unreal-real” is something that we are very interested in at the moment. Who decides what’s real and what’s not? And why are conceptual products less real than non-conceptual products? One can argue that even hallucinations are real in one person’s mind.

“In general, our work is considered unreal by many. But how do you define reality?”

Something that we are exploring in the OK Do Science Poems project, is the role of designers in scientific processes. You have said that designers shouldn’t have to wait until scientific ideas become technology as they could engage with science in a more speculative way. Can the field of science learn from the field of design? And vice versa?

AD: Developments within science, particularly life sciences, have potential to carry such dramatic impact on our lives that not only designers but all kinds of professionals need to explore their effects. As designers, we should try to influence how science becomes technology, making it more human for example. It would also be important to have debates with the public, and even the government, about different technological features before they are actualised. We see this as a shift away from designing applications – what designers are trained to do – to designing implications.

“As designers, we should try to influence how science becomes technology.”

How did you end up working with electronics?

AD: While doing a degree in industrial design in the early 80s, I became fascinated by the challenges and possibilities that electronics were creating. However, during my BA studies, I wasn’t allowed to do an electronics project, because the evaluators were only able to assess forms designed around mechanics. It was during those days that the form and the function were becoming disconnected. One of the reasons I went to RCA was that instead of designing surfaces, I could explore products from a more complex point of view, reflecting psychological, emotional, poetic and imaginative ideas.

Nowadays it seems like everybody is having a multidisciplinary approach to design projects. Do you often collaborate with experts from different fields when you work in areas such as the electromagnetic sphere?

AD & FR: We have dialogues but we don’t really collaborate. And when we implement a concept, we consider which skills we need to outsource – these can vary from programming and carpentering to film-making and psychological expertise. Our work is mostly self-initiated, and even when we work with companies, the projects are always designer-led. However, we are very open to exchange ideas with different people.

We couldn’t agree more on your statement that design should not just ask how sleek or usable some object is, but what it actually inclines us to do. Would you say that you aim to design behaviour?

AD: I think a lot of designers think that design is neutral but the fact is that all design is constructed and ideological and there is nothing natural or neutral about it. We purposefully create unnatural, awkward, exaggerated and not-that-friendly objects in order to point out that design is artificial and it always involves decisions. Therefore, I’d say that instead of designing objects that stimulate behaviour, we design objects that stimulate questions.

AD & FR: Our objects don’t make sense and fit into the system, but instead they create another parallel world of alternative reality that makes you question the existing system and its values. We design objects that nobody wants for now. However, it’s not that we are anti-industrial. Quite the opposite, we wish to ask why people seek philosophical pleasure from art and not from manufactured design products. Is it because the industry is too narrow, because people are too boring, or because the designers don’t want to create such products?

“All design is constructed and ideological and there is nothing natural or neutral about it.”

What are you working on at the moment?

AD: One of our ongoing projects looks at the future of food. The idea is that, as the planet becomes over-populated and food becomes an issue, rather than relying on governments and big industries to solve it, small groups of people – “foragers” – would get together. These teams would include hackers, guerilla gardeners, amateur horticulturalists and synthetic biologists, and they would develop devices to externalise their digestive system in order to be able to digest leaves, grass and other things that are undigestible at the moment. Alternatively, leaves and grass could be modified so that they would suit our systems.

We like your work because it stimulates discussion on the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies. Have you examined how designers and the industry have reacted to it?

AD: We have received quite aggressive reactions from designers, especially of older generations. Many of them think that design without industry is art, unreal or fantasy, and they get upset about assigning new roles to design – probably out of feeling threatened. On the other hand, we feel that the industry is, in some way, quite positive about our approach to decouple design from the industrial agenda and link it to other contexts, like the poetical one. At RCA, we do many industry projects and have figured that companies are really interested in learning to think differently about what they do and about applying fresh thinking that translates into tangible objects.

The Statistical Clock (left) checks the BBC website for technologically mediated fatalities and speaks them out loud. S.O.C.D (Sexual Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) is for people who enjoy porn but feel a bit guilty watching it, or think that it's wrong. Photo by the courtesy of Francis Ware.

In Design Noir (2001), you wrote that “beneath the glossy surface of official design lurks a dark and strange world driven by real human needs”. Do you feel that contemporary products do not match people’s needs – and has this improved since you wrote Design Noir? Do you think that people are reacting to that themselves and how should they be involved in design processes?

AD: I think the internet has expanded the range of possibilities for pleasure and for fulfilling one’s personal desires and fantasies, no matter how strange you are. But this still doesn’t apply to products, which remain essentially functional. However, the background or the infrastructure of products has definitely transformed. Before, if you were obsessed about something unusual – like I was about strange radio cultures – it was hard to find any information about it.

AD & FR: Involving people in design processes relates to the do-it-yourself culture which we are not so interested in. Everyone can start making and modifying things themselves, but we believe it’s important to have experts who can do special and beautiful things that are beyond the abilities of non-professionals.

AD: I get annoyed when people think that the DIY culture has made professionals useless. However, there are a lot of independent – yet professional – designers out there who offer radical products they create on their own.

FR: They are like activists; bottom-up designers. We like the story of activism, that there is room for free inventors. A good example is designer Panamarenko, who creates alternative flying machines that are conceptual yet functional, in theory.

We think that the line between a DIY designer and an independent professional can sometimes be quite difficult to draw. How do you define a design professional?

Someone who is committed to the highest possible standards (technical, aesthetic, ethical) and the huge effort it takes to achieve them. Professional design is also about being aware of a bigger historical story than yourself and analysing how your practice contributes to it and extends it. It’s about getting paid for what you do, rather than doing it as a hobby.

What is the motivation or reason for the corporate futurologists to “keep us in place” instead of exploring new territories and approaches that, according to your ideas, might make people more engaged through “complicated pleasure”?

AD & FR: The reason is that their job is to enforce the capitalist system and make sure that the sales remain high. Creating something unusual would be risky and expensive. In some areas, like furniture, this kind of experimentation might take place – Vitra’s Slow Chair designed by Bouroullec brothers is a good example – but not in electronics. Apple is active in some sense, but quite stuck to its aesthetics as well. Too many companies are driven by geeky men. If women had more power in the field, electronic objects would be more compelling.

“Too many companies are driven by geeky men. If women did more in the field, electronic objects would be more compelling.”

Why do you think electronic objects and systems are such an effective vehicle for expressing our desires and needs, and making existentialist choices?

AD: Our everyday life is mediated by social interaction much entangled with technology – for better or worse. The electronic objects and systems have integrated themselves so intimately into our lives that they have become a very powerful media. We do interact with chairs and tables as well, but the social impact of electronics is stronger: they work their way into our systems, conversations and relationships. They have become very entangled with our deepest selves.

FR: At the same time, electronics are overtaking human qualities and the potential of technology is often exploited for efficiency and profit.

AD: For example, it’s quite rude that you can be sent email at any time of the day.

Technology is often seen as either the opposite of human or as an extension of human. Many people feel embarrassed about using a certain technology, like online dating services, or about using technology too much. What do you think is the relationship between technology and identity?

AD & FR: We don’t think that the young generations view technology as something external anymore. For them, technology is an invisible media for living. And this internalisation actually becomes a platform for new type of activity that might, for example, be uninformed about life before the internet. Today’s generations make new assumptions such as that everybody has the right to photograph or videotape anybody else – and if you don’t approve that, you are a freak.