Dunne & Raby

PROJECT
Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival depicts the imagined artefacts of a fictional festival celebrating a shift in the collective mindset of human beings. Moving away from a human-centric viewpoint, it is imagined by designers Dunne & Raby that humanity could come to understand its place in a multi-species reality, where each organism perceives and experiences their shared environments from a unique sensory perspective. Accompanying the totems and mementos, which illustrate how human-produced sound, fragrance and matter is experienced by other species, a festival costume, including a hat, shoes, glove and rucksack, suggests the celebratory garments of another time and place. Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival asks humans to imagine how they impact the worlds of other species and how their presence is perceived and spatialised.

ABOUT
Designers Dunne & Raby are leaders in the field of ‘speculative design’, which uses tools and processes inherent to design to propose and test new ideas. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are partners in the design studio Dunne & Raby. They are professors of Design and Social Inquiry, and Co-Directors of the Designed Realities Studio at the New School, New York. Their books include Hertzian Tales (1999), Design Noir (2021) and Speculative Everything (2013). Their design projects are in permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the MAK, Vienna. In 2021 they were made Royal Designers for Industry and Life Fellows of the Royal Society of Arts.

DESIGNER’S STATEMENT
In a world of many worlds…all equally real, the human world is just one of many.
Our senses edit what is out there, as do those of every creature, reminding us that we ‘cannot bear too much reality’.
Some lifeforms live in worlds where the human body shape is meaningless. We appear more like clouds, or atmospheres, or energy fields, and our meatiness fades into insignificance
Our breath forms chemical swirls drifting through multiple umwelten. Strands of you stretch for miles, caressing the nervous systems of innumerable lifeforms.
Every footstep sends minute waves through the ground disturbing life within.
A click of the fingers travels further than one might think.
If traveling with others, you become a many legged, many armed, human mass.
Our communication media form dense, electrical features in the landscapes navigated by birds and other migrating creatures. The sound of a boat creates underwater acoustic masses as solid to some lifeforms as mountains are to us.
And ultimately, once we leave the human world behind, we become little more than biomass to be recycled and processed by a multitude of lifeforms for which we are simply calories, nutrition, raw material, or a home…

– Dunne & Raby, 2023

Co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts, Lausanne. This project is produced in collaboration with RMIT School of Design.