In Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby ask what design can do when familiar ideas of progress, prediction and problem-solving no longer feel sufficient.
The book moves between design, science, philosophy and literature to explore worlds and objects that are deliberately impossible, uncertain or incomplete. Through essays, images, imagined archives, glossaries and speculative artefacts, Dunne and Raby treat design not only as a way to produce solutions, but as a method for questioning the boundaries of reality and expanding what people are able to imagine.
For emerging designers, architects and artists, this is a challenging but valuable proposition. Creative education often asks students to respond to a brief, identify a problem and develop a plausible outcome. Not Here, Not Now creates space for a different kind of practice: one that uses fiction, ambiguity and impossible propositions to expose assumptions, resist predictable futures and discover questions that conventional methods may overlook.
At BE OPEN Academy, the book works particularly well as a deeper review because it connects speculative design with intellectual and cultural inquiry. It presents imagination not as an escape from reality, but as a critical tool for recognising that the present is only one possible arrangement of the world — and that design can help us perceive alternatives before they become practical or even fully thinkable.