‘What if educating designers to work with prevailing economic, social, technological and political realities – designing for how the world is now – has become a convenient conceit?’ – Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

Book design for speculative design duo Dunne and Raby’s sixth publication. While ‘Speculative Everything’ (2013) invited readers to imagine alternative futures, ‘Not Here, Not Now’ positions design as a tool for reimagining the present.

Central to the book’s thesis is the idea of ‘impossible objects’ – artefacts that materialise alternative realities and, in doing so, appear strange. Using our Monospace typeface, we designed the book with this ‘weirdness’ in mind: set with a deliberately formal voice for the body copy, then almost unnaturally enlarged for titles to reveal its stranger details. Developed from stencil letters found in a museum archive and redrawn over seven years, the typeface enabled subtle shifts in tone across the publication. A consistent typographic thread runs through the chapters, while small, deliberate design changes distinguish different modes of writing. With a silhouetted cover image on a white background, ‘Not Here, Not Now’ also formally echoes its predecessor.