Hybridity and Design - a short introduction

Over the past years, the concept of hybridity has gained more and more attention. Theorists like Donna Haraway or Bruno Latour have developed concepts that link Nature to culture. Due to the climate crisis, these concepts were of interest for design and art. But what is ‚Hybridity'? Where do we find it? And what are its implications for design? The seminar seeks to enlighten the understanding of the fashionable term by rooting it back to postmodernist thinking and to contemporary concepts of digitality and sustainable living.

Due to the climate crisis, these concepts were of interest for design and art. But what is ‚Hybridity'? Where do we find it? And what are its implications for design? By hybridity, I mean, in short, projects that can be classified neither entirely as something 'digital' nor entirely as something analog, such as Gui Bonsiepes Cybersyn Project. The concept of hybridity could help to frame the complexity and multi-layeredness of contemporary design processes. It is essentially aiming at the category of perception and the experience of the digital. It lies beyond a dichotomy of understanding the digital as culture or as something technological. It is to be understood as a more general concept of our interaction with artifacts, tools and methods of communication. This hybridity is particularly evident in figures such as the cyborg which served Donna Haraway as a metaphor for digital feminism in the 1980s and still does today. Hybridity, is a feature of digitality itself. Digitality must be a hybrid thing per se, because it establishes relations between different spheres. I am also thinking of projects in which hybridity is not a matter of a fixed form, but where process design takes place on the basis of interface - for example in Open Design.

This platform connects various topics from seminars at Muthesius and other projects in the context of design, sustainability and digitality. Hybridity is the overall term somehow inherent in all of them. It underlies projects on sustainability or authorship as well as texts thinking about traditional concepts of design such as Dieter Rams’ idea of good design.