Gerrard O’Carroll Memorial Lecture: Fiona Raby

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This event was on Thurs 10 November | 7pm

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Gerrard O’Carroll Memorial Lecture: Fiona Raby

10 November | 7pm | £5

Join the ninth and final talk in the Gerrard O’Carroll Memorial Lecture series, delivered by O’Carroll’s former colleague and collaborator, Fiona Raby. 

As one half of design studio Dunne and Raby, Raby’s work eschews the notion that design’s object is to meet briefs and solve problems. Instead, Raby revels in the problem itself, her curiosity-based design circulating around questions that give rise to yet more questions, challenging our assumptions on the conceivable and the desirable. Impossible prototypes, depictions of imagined worlds and the mapping of alternative futures form the outputs of a practice that employs art, architecture, design and speculative fiction as the medium to create dialogues around possible worlds. 

Since 2013, the Gerrard O’Carroll Memorial Lecture Series, inspired by the architect, writer, curator and Senior Tutor in the School of Architecture and Design at the Royal College of Art, London, has invited kindred maverick thinkers from across disciplines to see beyond our assumptions and imagine what the world can be. Embracing love and joy, darkness and despair in equal measure, the series proposes experimental, subversive and at times anarchic approaches to human existence. 

The series is developed in collaboration with Adrian O’Carroll and Rosy Head, and supported by Adrian and Jennifer O’Carroll. 

About Fiona Raby

 Fiona Raby is partner in the design studio Dunne & Raby. She is co-director of the Design Realities Studio with Anthony Dunne and University Professor of Design and Social Inquiry at the New School New York City. She was Chair and Professor of Industrial Design at Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna between 2011-2015 and a Reader in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art, London. At the RCA between 1995-2015 she led an architectural unit (ADS04) for 13 years and taught both in Computer Related Design and Design Interactions. 
 She is co-author of Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (2001, 2021). and Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming (2013).
 Dunne & Raby’s work has been exhibited at MoMA in New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Design Museum in London, and is in several permanent collections including MoMA and the V&A. Dunne & Raby received the inaugural MIT Media Lab Award in 2015, and in 2021, they were awarded the title Royal Designers for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts.