Not Here, Not Now

Description

A curious exploration of the role of design in the interplay of speculative thought, the notion of impossibility, and the design imagination, where ‘design’ isn't about solving design problems – it’s about expanding what design can be, and what can become from a reinvigorated design imagination.

It is classic D&R to ask one to consider the “design proposal” as prompt, not prescription, and to embrace deliberately unrealizable concepts as a way to fuel imagination. When the present moment has many feeling asthough reality itself is fractured, Not Here, Not Now makes the case for loosening the bonds of trad notions of reality if only for a moment, and take that moment to explore "impossible objects" as catalysts for new possibilities.

In a fashion, this is a much needed call to action — but not such calling for us to escape reality, nor slip our ontological moorings into an infinity of individual 'realities' of the 'you do you bro' variety.

Rather their CTA is to actively shape a more expansive reality through design – a practice fueled by questions, experiments, and a willingness to embrace the uncertain. It's a generative process, sparking investigations and explorations at the intersection of thought and everyday life.

Through a many coursed meal of interconnected and interlinked curiosities – drawing on philosophy, art, quantum physics – D&R invite designers to engage with a speculative “what-if,” nurturing creative ground from which yet-unknown futures might emerge. In the end, Not Here, Not Now is an optimistic call for design concerned with ideas over solutions, and a journey towards realities we can scarcely imagine.

Design can no longer be an operational task plugged into systems and organizations hellbent on efficiency and effect. It is a keyword representing our evolutionary advantage: the translation of imagination into form to make sense and make worlds.

From the publisher
“What it means to design at a time when, for many people, the future seems to have become an impossibility.

“When reality fails us, what can designers do? Question design’s relationship to reality, as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby do, in this exhilarating, yet thoughtful, journey to the edges of science, philosophy, and literature to find new ways of thinking about the possible—and about the meaning, function, and place of design in that speculative world of “not here, not now.” A conceptual travelogue of sorts, Not Here, Not Now brings together words, images, and objects that capture, in design form, some of the ideas encountered along the way. Itself a design experiment, the richly illustrated book explores ways to bring these ideas into conversation with objects through imagined archives, libraries, glossaries, taxonomies, lists, tales, and essays.

“The design responses in Not Here, Not Now—to a stone raft, for example, or a vegetable lamb, swatches of imaginary colors, a pocket universe in the home, objects undergoing space-time collapse—are, like the most compelling utopias, impossible by design, aiming instead to nourish the creative, intellectual, and imaginative ground from which new possibilities, still unknown, might begin to emerge.”