Design noir : the secret life of electronic objects

Dunne and Raby investigate the real physical and cultural effects of the digital domain, demonstrating that mobile phones, computers and other electronic objects such as televisions profoundly influence people's experience of their environment. Their ideas have important implications for architecture and design. In this, their first major book, they introduce their extraordinary new way of thinking about objects, space and behaviour to a broad audience. The book is divided into three sections: 1. Manifesto, introducing the authors' ideas about electromagnetic space. 2. Conversations, in which Dunne and Raby talk to a variety of designers, architects and artists about the impact electronic technology has on their practice. 3. Placebo, presenting the intriguing results of a project involving Dunne and Raby's working furniture prototypes, including a chair that lets the sitter know when radiation is passing through his body. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are Research Fellows at the Royal College of Art; London. Dunne trained as an industrial designer, and Raby as an architect, and both lived in Japan during the 1980s, where Dunne worked for Sony, and Raby worked for Toyo Ito. "The first book to be published on the work of their partnership (in 2001), Design Noir is the essential primary source for understanding the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings for Dunne & Raby's work. Consisting of three elements - a 'manifesto' on the possibilities of designing with and for the 'secret life' of electronic objects; notes for an embryonic network of critical designers and, most famously, the presentation of the Placebo Project ? a prototype for a critical design poetics enacted around electronic furniture-objects ? Design Noir offers an in-depth exploration of one of the most seminal design projects of the last two decades, one that arguably initiated speculating through design in its contemporary forms. By detailing the logic and character of the objects that were constructed; the involvement of users with these objects over-time, and in the creation of a new kinds of spatially and temporally distributed moments of critique and engagement with things, Design Noir presents the case-study of the Placebo project as a far more complex and subtler project than is often thought. As a bold and in many ways unprecedented experiment in design writing and book designing, Design Noir is itself an instance of the speculative propositional design it expounds."-- Dunne and Raby investigate the real physical and cultural effects of the digital domain, demonstrating that mobile phones, computers and other electronic objects such as televisions profoundly influence people's experience of their environment. Dunne and Raby's ideas have important implications for architecture and design In this, their first major book, they introduce their extraordinary new way of thinking about objects, space and behaviour to a broad audience. The book is divided into three 1. Manifesto, introducing the authors' ideas about electromagnetic space. 2. Conversations. Dunne and Raby talk to a variety of designers, architects and artists about the impact electronic technology has on their practice. 3. Placebo. The intriguing results of a project involving Dunne and Raby's working furniture prototypes, including a table with an integrated global positioning system and a chair that lets the sitter know when radiation is passing through his body. Beneath the glossy surface of official design lurks a dark and strange world driven by real human needs. The designers explore the way we interact with electronic objects