Some things do not exist. Yet they affect everything.
We work with futures that have not arrived. With identities not yet claimed. With spaces that are only partially real — diagrams, wireframes, rehearsal sites. Unreal does not mean imaginary. It means unfinished. Invisible. Suppressed. Delayed.
In design, the unreal is not decorative. It is structural.
It appears in the placeholder text that becomes permanent. In the template that becomes a brand. In the mockup that is treated as truth. Every artefact we present before something is real becomes part of its reality.¹⁶
At Gegen–Gegen™, we treat the unreal seriously.
We use speculation not as escape, but as resistance. Not as projection, but as permission.¹³ To imagine a new system is to test the edges of the current one. We do not design utopias. We prototype alternatives — flawed, fragile, sometimes absurd.¹³ But present.
Gegen-Gegen Logo Animation, 2025
The unreal appears in what the brief refuses to say. In what the user cannot explain. In what the institution will not fund. These are not gaps. They are material. They give us shape.
We have designed hospital signage for moments of disorientation that no floorplan accounts for — spaces of confusion, fear, grief.¹⁵ We have built interfaces around the slow movement of attention — not the fast click. These were not in the original scope. But they were already there.
To work with the unreal is not to deny the real. It is to reveal what it never contained.
To design is to live inside the unfinished — between what is said and what is needed.¹⁴