The animation loops printed on Shogun Kunitoki’s picture vinyl LP can be viewed using a special strobe light that the true fans of the band will build themselves.

With all the different ways of perceiving the world and with all the tools and instructions available to make almost anything, what will we do?

The most maverick manifestations of semi-professional design may be compared with chindōgu, a Japanese phenomenon of creating surreal tools for everyday life. For example, Portable Zebra Crossing is a carpet for pedestrians to fight against the tyranny of cars – the striped carpet can be rolled out across the road in a suitable crossing point. Chindōgu are sometimes described “unuseless” – that is, they cannot be regarded as useless in an absolute sense since they do actually concoct a method for making certain aspects of life more convenient, but in practical terms they cannot be called useful either. However, separated from the constraints of utilitarian application, they can take us into a new world of human invention (see also Kenji Kawakami’s book The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions, 2005).

In the spirit of chindōgu, small-scale utopian ideas are being materialised and shared within semi-professional communities where new trains of thought get involved in design processes.

Shogun Kunitoki’s album Vinonaamakasio was released as a picture vinyl LP featuring two animation loops that can be viewed using a special strobe light which the true fans of the band will build themselves. The Shogun Kunitoki Strobe Light Kit containing a circuit board, a 9V battery clip, a blue resistor, a brown resistor, a capacitor, a 555 timer IC, a super bright LED and a switch can be bought online and compiled according to the soldering instructions Jari Suominen, the keyboard player of the band, posted online.

Jari Suominen is a semi-professional designer. He describes his projects as something in between design, art and science; “embedded systems that work magically, hiding their digital nature.” He also regards them as DIY activity because of their exploratory nature and the fact that they are usually inspired by the possibility of making things for oneself within reasonable price.

Typically using the open source Arduino microcontroller and Processing programming environment as tools, Suominen believes that a successful design process either starts from forgetting what’s possible and what’s not or simply from what’s available: ”if you find a bunch of cheap electronics somewhere, then you buy it,” he says.

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.

TileToy is an open source project that applies the flexibility of digital software to physical led tiles for imaginative uses.

2. Semi-professional design practices

Semi-professional design activity can be seen as design on demand; people getting exactly what they want by designing it for themselves. It can also be seen as pure enjoyment brought to some through problem-solving processes or aesthetic challenges. Whichever, rather than helping companies, semi-professional designers primarily help themselves and learn from each other online.

Developing artifacts and artifact modifications, semi-professional designers are comparable to lead users, characterized by Eric von Hippel in Democratizing Innovation (2005) as people who are currently experiencing needs that will later be experienced by many. Operating in non-institutional contexts, they re-use, enrich and review predominant practices. From this viewpoint, semi-professional designers are also comparable to artists with courageous and hypersensitive qualities. Like artists, or scientists, they are looking for something that’s not there yet.

“Like artists, or scientists, semi-professional designers are looking for something that’s not there yet.”

A custom of endless reconstruction can be detected within semi-professional design practices, where nothing ever gets ready but keeps on developing over time in various different hands and minds. Semi-professional design ceases to exist when it turns into definitive products. Instead, it strives for prototypes; or fantasies materialised.

A certain aesthetic of incompleteness applies to semi-professional design. Tuomo Tammenpää also uses the expression ”clumsy aesthetics”, when talking about the design of DIY electronics and his TileToy project with Daniel Blackburn. “The clumsiness or the unfinished nature of artefacts underlines the act of crafting,” he points out. “Also, it refers to bringing forward the contents of devices, and thus opening them up for further examination and development.”

This is what Tammenpää and Blackburn’s TileToy project is essentially about: providing an open, versatile platform for people to develop imaginative means of use. TileToy brings the flexibility inherent in digital software to a set of physical led tiles that people can touch and play with. Both the source code and the hardware are available via open licences, allowing anyone to create their own applications and share them online.

In my classification of semi-professional design practices, TileToy falls into the category of open design. Promoting the ideals of free culture, open design builds on transparency and public collaboration – sharing ideas and know-how while receiving peer review and best practice techniques in return. The other four categories later to be explored in the Semi-professional design series are genotyping, personal fabrication, creative misuse and innovative repair.

Botanicalls is an open source DIY electronics kit for building a channel of communication between plants and humans.

1. Introduction

Empowered by digital takeover, the mass of intermediated ideas and social creativity entering the everyday life is making anyone a semi-professional in anything and broadening the field of design. Instead of concentrating simply on the interaction between a ready-made artifact and its user, design has increasingly spread out to domains facilitating semi-professional, interdisciplinary design initiatives in order to gain new insight – “design for designability”, as described by researcher Kari-Hans Kommonen.

Working with finite knowledge and an increasing variety of tools and networks, semi-professional designers often surprise with ingenious answers to questions only children would ask (see also Ulla-Maaria Mutanen’s Play Time column for Craftzine). For example, when Robert Faludi, Kate Hartman, Kati London and Rebecca Bray came up with the idea of Botanicalls, an open source DIY electronics kit for building a channel of communication between thirsty plants and their owners, a more utopist version of it, Growduino, was soon introduced on Makezine’s blog. Growduino is the work of a hobbyist who wanted his plants to water themselves automatically when he was away for holiday.

The open source development from Botanicalls to Growduino illustrates a spontaneous design process among strangers, possibly inter disciplines, and definitely somewhere in the borderline of the real and the imaginary. It shows how people with different skills and interests can come together online to share their work and to provide building blocks for other projects. Given some thought, in the right (or unexpected) hands, and with the right tools, ideas like Botanicalls or Growduino might eventually lead into something essential.

Semi-professional design practices are characteristically open and innovative. They are motivated by utility or recreation, and they range from developing things to modifying things. Looking at the evolution of artifacts within communities of people who are not full-time designers by profession or assemblies of design amateurs and design professionals, the Semi-professional design series attempts to acquire a better understanding of the effects that digital technology has and will have on design. It examines digital technologies firstly as means for sharing how-to knowledge, secondly as means for making custom artifacts and eventually as means for reaching new spheres of design thinking.

The Semi-professional design series is based on Jenna’s MA thesis (2008), Semi-Professional Design Catalog, at the Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki.