Fiona Raby
Fiona Raby’s Book List
My book list is like album tracks that take me back to a moment in time.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture by Moshe Safdie
If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture
By Moshe Safdie
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
Published: September 2022
One of the world’s greatest and most thoughtful architects recounts his extraordinary career and the iconic structures he has built—from Habitat in Montreal to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore—and offers a manifesto for the role architecture should play in society.
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Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future
By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022
Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.
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Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People
By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022
Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.
Milton Glaser: POP: by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Milton Glaser: POP
By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023
This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.
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Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022
Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”
Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman
Women Holding Things
By Maira Kalman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: October 2022
In the spring of 2021, Maira and Alex Kalman created a small, limited-edition booklet, “Women Holding Things,” which featured select recent paintings by Maira, accompanied by her insightful and deeply personal commentary. The booklet quickly sold out. Now, the Kalmans have expanded that original publication into an extraordinary visual compendium. We see a woman hold a book, hold shears, hold children, hold a grudge, hold up, hold her own. In visually telling their stories, Kalman lays bare the essence of women’s lives—their tenacity, courage, vulnerability, hope, and pain.
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