Speculative Wunderkammer Summary

“Speculative Wunderkammer,” as Dunne and Raby names it, is a way to convey curiosity, to make the viewer wonder and imagine in a scale larger than an art piece or just a typical product design. For them, the position of the speculative design is always an issue. People generally tend to struggle when it comes to connect or relate themselves with the design they are looking at. However, this time they decided to dig even further. They decided to experiment with an exhibition curated by Michael John Gorman, where they used questions as a way to frame each exhibit with a speculation. An invitation to step out of their everyday reality and imagine “what if...” questions proposals on specific topics that would relate to different people. Some of these questions were “What if human …show more content…
What if we could evaluate the genetic potential of lovers? What if we could use smell to find the perfect partner?” (A. D. Raby 2013). This is going to sound very weird, but when I read the question about what if we could use smell to find our partner?, I related to it. It made me wonder and think about dogs, and how they use smell to identify other dogs. Just by using smell, they can even recognize dogs that have been there in the same spot before and now they are not. These kind of questions makes us wonder, think, and speculate something else than what we are used to see. It makes us perceive the world in a different way. For this reason, Dunne and Raby, used the store front of Wellcome Trust, a science organization in London, as the medium to project the questions to the spectators. They wanted to create a strong visual impact that could be viewed at different distances. They wanted people to stare at these questions from the nearby bus stop, the sidewalk, and the passing busses. The ability of these exhibitions or questions to stimulate curiosity and intrigue was the Speculative Wunderkammer of Dunne and