The MAK DESIGN SALON #04 is focusing on fiction and reality: with their contribution The School of Constructed Realities, the London-based designer duo Dunne & Raby explores the potentials of speculative design in view of the challenges and forecasts we face in the 21st century.
Dunne & Raby
Works by the studio serve as case studies for The School of Constructed Realities, a fictitious school of design at MAK Design Salon #04 in Vienna.
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- 10 July 2015
- Vienna
The School of Constructed Realities is a platform to weave different ideas and experiments together focused on how yet-to-exist worlds can be presented through design. The aim is to encourage visitors to think about the role of design education in relation to how different futures are imagined and shaped.
The School of Constructed Realities is the title of a short story that Dunne & Raby first published in 2014 on the online portal of Maharam (an artistically progressive textile house that was founded in New York in 1902 by the Russian immigrant Louis Maharam).
Anthony Dunne, founder and for many years Head of the Design Interactions Department at the Royal College of Art in London, and Fiona Raby, Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, have been considered pioneers of a conceptual design movement for several years. With The School of Constructed Realities, they suggest an alternative approach to contemporary design education, which – even today – is still in part oriented towards the arts and crafts and Bauhaus movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Each room in the MAK Branch Geymüllerschlössel hints at new teaching and learning themes, such as “World Hinting,” “Aesthetics of Unreality,” “Physical Fictions,” “A New Normal,” “Beyond Realism,” and “Object Taxonomies.” Works of Dunne & Raby – both recent and specially developed for this exhibition project – serve as case studies in these sessions.
Together with Franciszkiewicz, one of their former Design Interactions students, they developed the film project Meinong’s Taxonomy of Objects (2015) for the MAK DESIGN SALON #04, which addresses the Theory of Objects by the Austrian philosopher and founder of the Graz School of experimental psychology, Alexius Meinong (1853–1920).
until 4 October 2015
Dunne & Raby
The School of Constructed Realities
MAK Design Salon #04
MAK Branch Geymullerschlössel
Pötzleinsdorferstraße 102, Vienna