Fiona Raby
Partner, Dunne + Raby

Bruce Sterling
Author, Tomorrow Now and Shaping Things

Tim Durfee
MDP, LIKE NOW, DurfeeRegn

Fiona Raby and Bruce Sterling, two of the world’s most influential voices at the intersection of fiction and design, will join MADE UP curator Tim Durfee to discuss tactical anachronisms, designing for ambiguous reality, and the re-emergence of speculative practice in the 21st century. Moderated by Anne Burdick, MDP Chair.

Fiona Raby studied Architecture at the RCA before working for Kei'ichi Irie Architects in Tokyo. She also holds an MPhil in Computer Related Design from the RCA. She was a founding member of the CRD Research Studio where she worked as a Senior Research Fellow leading externally funded research projects. She taught in Architecture for over 10 years before teaching in Design Interactions.

Fiona is also a partner in Dunne + Raby, a creative design partnership that use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies. She is co-author, with Anthony Dunne, of Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects.

Bruce's most recent book-length essays question and promote how the future is shaping our concepts of self, time and space, including Shaping Things (2005), and Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002).

Bruce was the founder of the Dead Media Project, an on-line reliquary of forgotten media technologies. He founded the Viridian Design Movement, an environmental aesthetic movement founded on the ideas of global citizenship, environmental design and techno-progressiveness.

His writings have been very influential in the cyberpunk movement in literature, specifically the novels Heavy Weather (1994), Islands in the Net (1988), Schismatrix (1985), The Artificial Kid (1980), and Involution Ocean (1977). He co-authored, with William Gibson, The Difference Engine (1990), a novel that is part of the steampunk sub-genre.

Tim Durfee is organizer-curator-director of the events that comprise the MADE UP series. Tim became part of the core faculty at the MDP in 2009, after a two-year visiting Associate Professorship at Woodbury University. Before that, he taught for twelve years at SCI-Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture), where we was Director of Visual Studies. Tim’s independent and collaborative practices are diverse, but — resisting the term ‘multi-disciplinary’— attempt to operate in a way where the appropriate mode and medium for a given project emerges from a process of research and inquiry. Some of this work includes award-winning buildings, exhibitions, online exhibitions, sign systems, motion and sound.

image:Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen