Dunne & Raby, Huggable Mushroom from Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times,
What does a designer do in response to the proliferation of electronic transmitting device from mobile phones to baby monitors? A traditional designer might take a job with Apple or Samsung and create better-looking baby monitors or more user friendly mobiles.
But Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby responded more critically. They programmed a radio scanner with frequencies related to baby intercoms and illegal bugging devices and drove around London collecting information about the presence of electro-magnetic fields and created Tuneable Cities, a series of maps recording the hidden sounds of the suburbs. On some streets in the suburbs almost half the houses transmitted domestic soundscapes leaked through baby intercoms.
