Anthony Dunne, RCA Interactions Design Program

At the Royal College of Art's Design Interactions program, design waits for no one. The UK-based program rejects the old "passive approach" to design, wherein designers have to wait on technological advances before they start experimenting with new scientific ideas. "We shouldn't have to just wait until scientific ideas become technology," says program head Anthony Dunne. "We can engage with science in a more speculative way." Students and faculty members in the program play around with scientific concepts, actively imagining the products that might result from advances in fields ranging from biotechnology to nanotechnology. The resulting designs aren't final products but launching points for further investigation, research, and discussion.
Photo: François Coquerel

The recent discovery that bees are extraordinary odor detectors — able to be trained within minutes to respond to a target scent — inspired recent Design Interactions graduate Susana Soares to design "BEES, New Organs of Perception." Soares worked with glassblowers to create containers that harness bees' natural olfactory talent for medical diagnosis. Soares imagines a patient blowing into one of the glass chambers and watching for certain behaviors in the bees that might suggest the presence of disease. Afterward, the bees can be released. "It's a sustainable way of using the biological systems around you," Soares says.

"Evidence Dolls," designed by Dunne and his colleague Fiona Raby, take a darker view of scientific progress. Looking to approach the question, "How will dating change when DNA analysis can reveal the presence of undesirable genes?" Dunne and Raby created dolls capable of storing genetic material of potential partners. The dolls, which are intended for single women and can be personalized to represent different men, contain drawers for hair, toenail clippings, saliva, and semen. Dunne and Raby do not intend for Evidence Dolls to actually be mass-produced; they envision the dolls as a conversation starter on the implications of scientific advances.
Photo: Kristof Vrancken

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