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September 14, 2004
Design Noir: the Secret Life of Electronic Objects
| Title | Design Noir: the Secret Life of Electronic Objects | |
| Author | Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby | |
| Publisher | August/Birkhäuser, London | |
| Date | November 2001 | |
| ISBN | 3-7643-6566-8 | |
| Reviewed by | Jane Szita | |
| If electronic products are mostly as bland as a Hollywood blockbuster, then Noir products reflect a more complex and ambivalent view of reality, in which things can — and do — go wrong, and the consumer is reinvented as an anti-hero beset by existential dilemmas. This is the scenario explored by designers and researchers Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne in this book, as they uncover "the more complex reality hiden beneath the slick surface of electronic consumerism." Electronic objects are not, it turns out, smart, self-contained gismos: they leak radiation into the space and objects surrounding them, and into our bodies. Electro-magnetic radiation, the authors argue, forms a new kind of environmental condition which they call "Hertzian space." Although invisible (and therefore ignored by designers and architects), it is — unlike cyberspace — real, three-dimensional and spatial. Ultimately, they predict, Hertzian space will shape objects and buildings. Architecture will evolve to provide shelter from it, filter it, furnish views and allow for privacy. Currently, though, the electronic product is a neglected medium, offering a "pathetically narrow" range of emotions. The potential remains for "a new category of objects that provide complex aesthetic and psychological experiences within everyday life." What such objects might be is suggested by existing products like the Truth Phone, which detects when a caller is lying, and by Dunne and Raby’s own Placebo range of prototype furniture, which monitors, reacts to and offers (psychological) protection from Hertzian space. The placebo pieces were loaned to ordinary people, whose reactions to their poetic possibilities, as detailed in the book, indicate that Dunne and Raby are correct in their analysis of unfulfilled consumer needs for more subtle interactions with electronic products. | ||
Posted by Books Editor at September 14, 2004 09:33 PM