Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
The MIT Press (May 2025)

 

Although, yes, “it’s not here and not now,” but perhaps some day…

I cannot recall a prior time when the world was more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than it is today…and I suspect that the world will become even more challenging in years to come. Presumably Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby agree.

“Although we hope this book will be of value to people working in a range of fields, not just design, it is specifically aimed at those, like us, grappling with design in metaphysically turbulent times, which it seems are set to continue for some time yet. As practitioners based in academia, we are always faced with the question of how to write. And the structure of this book is itself a design project that explores different ways of bringing ideas about impossibility into conversation with objects — actual and imagined, existing and invented, made from words, images, and matter — through national archives, libraries, glossaries, lists, tales, and of course essays.”

Dunne and Raby agree: “It is hard to focus on ideas that do not have immediate or obvious practical applications in the face of challenges, many of which lie beyond the scope of deign as a field…Rather than more futures or end points extrapolated from a faulty [or insufficient] present, new starting points are needed. Spaces to momentarily step out of existing realities, a ‘not here, not now,’ to imagine different ways of being in the world, made tangible through the design of everyday things. Not as an escape, not as a vision of how things will or should be, but to shake off old habits, patterns, and mindsets in preparation for as yet unknown realities…As designers, when we design for the ‘not here, not now,’ our work is by default relocated to a ‘future.’ Particularly if technology is involved. But futures are just one way of framing the not here and not now. And not always the most helpful for the kind of work we do, In contrast to futurology, future studies, and foresight, which all attempt to mitigate risk in the face of uncertainty or identify preferred futures, the future’s primary value for us has been as a place for thought experiments that explore alternative values and worldviews made concrete through the design of everyday things. Not as an end point, but a starting point.”

Dunne and Raby point out that  — for them, — the value of designing for the “not here, not now” is that “objects can simultaneously be in the world as it is through their physicality and apart from it conceptually.” It would be helpful to keep in mind that the essays, experiments, and projects in this book “evolved in dialogue with each other through whatvweclike to think of as a designerly form of inquiry: spiraling loops cuiosity consisting of questions, experiemts, classes, readingsa, xconversations, lectures, pzrojects, writings, and reflections….Each section looks at the idea of the ‘impossible object’ through a different lens or different perspective — varieties, scales, uses,and misuses, places of enciunter, histories, fiction, and language.”

Dunne and Raby express their hope that those who read Not Here, Not Now will find it “inspiring and generative, the beginning of a journey rather than an end. One that sparks many more investigations and explorations that expand the possibilities that arise when speculative forms of thought, from many different fields, meet design practices concerned withbthe design of things, objects — the stuff of everyday life.”

I commend Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby on their brilliant, substantial contributions to thought leadership throughout the global marketplace of speculation.  I highly recommend this material to all C-level executives and those who aspire to become one as well as to others who are also “grappling with design in metaphysically turbulent times, which it seems are set to continue for some time yet.”

Unless you design your future, others will seize the opportunity to do so. As Ernest Becker asserts in his eponymous classic, no one can deny physical death but there is another form of death that can be denied: that which occurs when we become wholly preoccupied with fulfilling other’s expectations of us.

My own hope is that you and others who read (and hopefully re-read) this book with do so with an open mind and insatiable curiosity. Let your imagination embrace “a larger reality,” one that includes all that is yet to exist or might never exist…the unreality…the “not here, not now.”

* * *

Here are two suggestions while you are reading Not Here, Not Now: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to the annotated “Notes,” Pages 263-271.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.