Not Here, Not Now Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination

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 design 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 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, e.g., 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.

Anthony Dunne is University Professor of Design and Social Inquiry at The New School/Parsons in New York. He is the author of Hertzian Tales (MIT Press).
Fiona Raby is University Professor of Design and Social Inquiry at The New School/Parsons in New York. Her projects are included in several permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the MAK, Vienna.

Together they are the award-winning partners behind the design studio Dunne & Raby. They are also Co-Directors of the Designed Realities Studio at The New School/Parsons in New York. Their books include Hertzian Tales, Design Noir, and Speculative Everything.