Fiona Raby
Partner in Dunne & Raby

Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times

As designers and architects we have an unthinking optimism about the future. We automatically assume that what we design is neutral and implicitly good. There is a deeply embedded ideology that the role of design and architecture is to make the world a better place. We design for the perfect citizen, never questioning their behaviour and motivations. The presentation will explore the contradictions between people as citizens and consumers, using critical design proposals, in this case 'Evidence Dolls', as a tool to debate technological futures.

Evidence Dolls
IVF, Designer babies, DNA analysis, embryonic research, clones, stem cells, gene therapy. What does it all mean?

We are doing a project that tries to imagine the sort of implications these technologies might have on our everyday lives. We are doing an experiment to speculate on how dating might change in the future – if we could check out the DNA of potential men in the dating game and find out about their genetic future and the genetic future of any potential offspring, would this have any impact on our future relationships?

Evidence Dolls was realised through a commission from the Pompidou Centre. It consists of one hundred specially designed dolls used to provoke discussion amongst a group of young single women about the impact of genetic technology on their lifestyle. The project is part of an ongoing investigation into how design can be used as a medium for public debate on the social, cultural and ethical impact of emerging technologies.