Design Noir : The Secret Life of Electronic Objects

Dunne, Anthony; Raby, Fiona

ISBN 10: 1350070637 / ISBN 13: 9781350070639

Published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 40531383-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Design Noir : The Secret Life of Electronic Objects
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350070637
• ISBN 13: 9781350070639
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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 projectas 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.

About the Authors

Eduardo Staszowski is Professor of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design and Director of the Parsons DESIS Lab, USA. He is the co-editor of the Designing in Dark Times, Radical Thinkers in Design, and Beyond the Modern series, and Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Clive Dilnot is professor of Design Studies at Parsons The New School for Design, New York, USA. Recent publications include Ethics? Design? (2005) and the text for Chris Killip: Pirelli Work (2007).