Are Friends Electric?

Source

https://www.frieze.com/article/are-friends-electric
Date Added

4 March 2002, 18:03
Tags

Critical Design Opinion Essay Weblink English

Notes

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'Design Noir' is a term invented by Dunne and Raby to describe the process behind the placebo objects. Suggesting that mainstream product design is analogous to the Hollywood blockbuster - all slick production and happy endings - they propose a design concept that is all psychological drama and existentialism. The idea that objects have a secret life hinges on the notion of hubris; consumer electronics that appear to offer control over our environment may actually be doing the opposite (how do you know your washing machine and your mobile phone aren't sharing a laugh at your expense?). Out of these ideas Dunne and Raby graft a 'no logo' message: that there is a need for a critical design practice embodying alternative social, cultural, technical or economic values in the face of commercial design that unquestioningly affirms the industrial agenda.

In Design Noir this happens in two ways—in the extended interviews conducted by Fiona Raby and the photographs by Jason Evans—which are also far more than simple documentation of the work. Raby is insistent that the photographs in the book are important in their own right; as pictures that both show and extend the project, and which do so by linking the objects they created and the external and internal lives and of the people who lived with them. As she puts it, Evans managed to capture and present an imaginative dimension from each of our adopters. He did this by enacting their desires and thoughts, with them, in their homes, surrounded by their own expressions of themselves, and making them material. They were not told how to sit or pose; he made them comfortable enough to enact with him ideas and scenarios from their own imaginations.11