Design Noir

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 of 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. It 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 the creation of new kinds of spatially and temporally distributed moments of critique and engagement with things, Design Noir presents the case study of the Placebo project as 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.