Dunne & Raby

The School of Constructed Realities

Knowledge
The School of Constructed Realities
Credit: Video Still, Meinong's Taxonomy of Objects, Concept and creative direction: Dunne & Raby, Animation: Lukas Franciszkiewicz
2015
Dunne & Raby (United Kingdom)
Essay (New York: Maharam Stories)

The School of Constructed Realities is a fictitious approach to the current design schools that is taught on the basis of styles from the arts and crafts movement and the Bauhaus era. In contrast, Dunne & Raby’s school offers an alternative educational system of theoretical, practical and discursive workshops, in which they explore myriad ideas for different versions of reality with the help of design. The school does not provide its students with disciplines in a conventional sense, but they are encouraged to study seemingly unconnected subjects, such as “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Critical Theory” combined with “Impossible Architecture” or “Scenario Making and Worldbuilding” mixed with “Ideology and Found Realities”. In this project, Dunne & Raby give equal importance to fictional and imaginative things, a concept that they have adapted from Alexius Meinong and his “Theory of Objects.” Today, his theory is better known as Meinong’s Jungle—a collection of strange objects.