Workshop and lecture with Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

British designers, researchers, and studio partners Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby join The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture’s Interior Design Program for a week-long workshop with students titled “Designing for a World of Many Worlds.” 

This workshop will guide participants to visualize and materialize an object, device, environment, or being from a nonhuman perspective through hands-on experimentation, physical modeling, and iteration. During the visit, Dunne and Raby will also present a public lecture on Wednesday, February 11 at 5pm (CT) which explores how design can help us navigate an increasingly uncertain and surreal reality. The lecture is free and open to the public.  

Dunne and Raby's public lecture and week-long workshop is the fourth installation of a five-year Emily Summers Craft & Artisanship in Interior Design program, designed to provide students with ongoing opportunities to explore and celebrate the role of craft and artisanship in interior environments. Known for their work in speculative design, Dunne & Raby embrace the unknowable and alien, explore materials, forms and behaviors to shift perspective and imagine worlds beyond our own, deepening the program’s vision.  

“Fiona and Anthony's future-oriented design work confronts the unknown with profound curiosity and creativity,” said Igor Siddiqui, Program Director for Interior Design. “They offer a provocative and timely model of experimental practice to our students, and we are thrilled to have them here in Austin with us.” 

Their workshop will focus on the concept of an umwelt—the unique world each creature experiences through its senses—to speculate on what it means to be seen by a bat, a plant, a machine, or other nonhuman lifeforms, rather than trying to see the world as they do. The goal of their workshop is not to fully comprehend nonhuman experience, but to celebrate its irreducibility and discover what it can teach about designing differently. 

Dunne and Raby are partners in the design studio Dunne & Raby and Distinguished Visiting Professors at the China Academy of Art. Through their projects and writing, they explore how speculative forms of thought from science, philosophy, and literature can inform and expand design practice.  

For more information on their public lecture, visit the School of Architecture’s website.