“Why can’t design objects be inspired by particle physics?”
British artists Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne posed the question to a crowd in the Goldsmith Lecture Hall, part of the School of Architecture, on Wednesday. In their lecture, “Designing When ‘Spacetime is Doomed,’” Raby and Dunne explained how they work together to make designs critiquing the relationship between humans, science and technology.
They are best known for “speculative design,” a newer design approach which focuses on imagining future scenarios. The pair has artwork in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Outside of the lecture, they are hosting a weeklong workshop from Monday, Feb. 9 to Friday, Feb. 13, for interior design students.
During the presentation, Raby described their 2007 “no 1, Robots project,” where they instilled robotic qualities in a strange set of objects, such as creating a red ring that moves itself when it senses electromagnetic waves from a phone or television set. They cited the project as a career “turning point,” letting them question human-technology dynamics.
“We wanted to think of our robots as co-inhabitants, as cultural objects like furniture, rather than relatives of dishwashers and refrigerators,” Raby said.
Aside from exploring science through their art, Ruby and Dunne hosted a class with biotechnology students to practice speculative design. Instead of making predictions, they aimed to open a space for debate about what the future will look like.
“It wasn’t about providing the solutions to this kind of future of this technology,” Raby said. “It was about expanding (the) possibility of asking questions, so the most interesting projects were those that pose dilemmas and … showed multiple angles on the technology.”
One of the attendees, Heidi Rolf, an interior design graduate student, studies in Raby and Dunne’s workshop and said she appreciates their subverted approach.
“It’s really been interesting to imagine a more open-ended world where you’re looking for questions as much as you are for answers,” Rolf said.
Raby and Dunne’s deep dive into speculation brought them to the concept of centering themselves in nonhuman spaces. Their 2023 project, “Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival,” features common objects, such as a teapot, attached to poles similar to staffs or effigies humans may carry in festivals. The artists aimed to comment on the human world from the teapot’s viewpoint.
“We’re always linked by human imagination senses, so this inquiry is more about shifting perspective, seeing ourselves in the human world differently and our impact on other life forms,” Dunne said.
Ellie Holcomb, an interior design graduate student, said the college paused their regular classes for Raby and Dunne’s workshop, in which students made artwork from the perspective of an animal, plant or environmental setting. Holcomb’s project, for example, focuses on the trumpet honeysuckle.
“We have to think, ‘How does the trumpet honeysuckle view the human?’” Holcomb said. “How does it view the world? What senses does it feel? … That thinking framework is so interesting, and it’s so unnatural to me.”
Raby said that while humans can’t fully place themselves in another’s perspective, it’s important to try.
“We will never know what it’s like to be another living species,” Raby said. “But every attempt … is an essential exercise in empathy, stretching the human imagination. Ultimately, it’s about celebrating their alienness and their unknowability, acknowledging the inaccessibility of their world.”
