The Designed Realities Studio is a research and teaching unit led by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby at The New School in New York. Through practice-led research and project-based teaching, it aims to integrate theory and practice into concrete responses to the complex fusion of politics and technology shaping today’s social realities.

For many people, reality is broken, at least in the West. Rather than more futures, or end visions extrapolated from a faulty present, we need new starting points. New worldviews. Space to momentarily step outside existing realities. A ‘not here, not now’, to imagine new ways of seeing 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. Instead of more futures, we need more superpositional, entangled, analogous, and parallel worlds (or realities) that challenge the Newtonian imaginary currently shaping the contours of the possible, limiting both collective and individual imagining.

The Designed Realities Studio is a space where imagination can thrive, the otherwise is celebrated, and design as a still young discipline, is treated as a work in progress with much potential yet to be discovered.

This website serves as an ideas sketchbook for work in progress by us, our students and collaborators, with occasional detours into projects and texts.

The unit operates on a number of levels: collaborative research projects, commissions, self-initiated projects, and taught studio classes, all disseminated through talks, exhibitions and publications.