Fiona Raby

Architect; Product/Industrial Designer; Interaction Designer / United Kingdom / Dunne & Raby; Royal College of Art; University of Applied Arts, Vienna

Fiona Raby’s Book List

My book list is like album tracks that take me back to a moment in time.

6 books
Margaret Atwood

When Computer Related Design became Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art and our world broadened from digital technologies to more ethically troublesome bio-technologies, Tony (Dunne) and I struggled to convince designers that this might be something significant to think about. Oryx and Crake gave us the encouragement we needed. While reading it, we took great delight in identifying the many biotech references we had also come across in our own research.

Margaret Atwood

The use of satire and the careful handling of the absurd is something Tony (Dunne) and I continue to pursue in our own work. How to make something sharp and knowing, layered and complex, and also, what to leave out. How to deliver a “lightness of touch,” which this book does beautifully.

J. G. Ballard

As young researchers working in Computer Related Design during the early days, Dunne and Raby’s European sensibilities were regularly exposed to Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, much like Super-Cannes’s fictional “Eden-Olympia.” Among the beautiful gardens of Palo Alto’s research labs, and the super-bright minds focused on logic, processes, and systems, Antonio’s Nut House on California Avenue provided the only slightly grimy sanctuary.

Haruki Murakami

Tony (Dunne) and I spent three years living in Tokyo straight after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London. Tokyo still continues to make an impression on us. The quirkiness of Murakami’s characters and the ease at which his idiosyncratic, imaginative world seamlessly intertwines with the everydayness of a playfully technological Tokyo is just pure pleasure and delight.

Will Self

This must be one of my all-time favorite books! But also see “Foie Humain,” which centers on the Plantation Club, in Will Self’s Liver. The descriptions are pure genius, the engagement total—I am utterly absorbed.

Luigi Serafini

Written in a strange language, coming from another place entirely, the idea that the material world could be shaped by and embody a very different set of values than the ones surrounding us today. The inventive and wondrous visual creativity in this book has fueled Dunne & Raby’s current fascination with a kind of imaginative speculative anthropology.

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