Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination
May 7, 2025
About
Join us at the MIT Museum as we welcome award-winning designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby to discuss their new book, Not Here, Not Now, in conversation with John Ochsendorf, Founding Director of MIT Morningside Academy of Design (MAD). The event will be moderated by MIT Museum Director Michael John Gorman.
When reality fails us, what can designers do? Question design’s relationship to reality, as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby do, in this exhilarating, yet thoughtful, journey to the edges of science, philosophy, and literature to find new ways of thinking about the possible—and about the meaning, function, and place of design in that speculative world of “not here, not now.” A conceptual travelogue of sorts, Not Here, Not Now brings together words, images, and objects that capture, in design form, some of the ideas encountered along the way. Itself a design experiment, the richly illustrated book explores ways to bring these ideas into conversation with objects through imagined archives, libraries, glossaries, taxonomies, lists, tales, and essays.
Copies of Not Here, Not Now will be available for purchase onsite from the MIT Press Bookstore.
Registration
$5 General Admission
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Speakers
- Anthony Dunne — University Professor of Design and Social Inquiry, The New School/Parsons
- Fiona Raby — University Professor of Design and Social Inquiry, The New School/Parsons
- John Ochsendorf — Founding Director of MIT Morningside Academy of Design, and Professor, MIT Architecture and MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Moderator: Michael John Gorman — The Mark R. Epstein (Class of 1963) Director of the MIT Museum, and Professor of the Practice of Science, Technology, and Society, MIT
Information
May 7, 2025 6pm
MIT Museum