Hybrid Futures Lab

Description

The Hybrid Futures Lab is a transdisciplinary research initiative at the intersection of philosophy, technology and design. Informed by an ethos of transversality, it is a space for thinkers, practitioners, designers, artists, and technologists to experiment with, give tangible form to, and contest potential futures through speculative-pragmatic interventions and research.

The Hybrid Futures Lab brings together ideas and practices from process philosophies and design studies to produce a critical inquiry on the impact of technologies on the planet. It is interested in developing bold strategies for re-imagining, prototyping and crafting techno-digital futures right here and right now, in the present.

As technologies modify humanity's cognitive, social, perceptual, affective and environmental habitat, they raise unprecedented challenges, exacerbate existing issues, create new problems: digital governance, surveillance, and control; politics of extraction of resources both human (time, attention, labour) and non-human (raw minerals); injustice and exploitation on a global scale to feed digital economies; ethical questions around AI; asymmetrical access to digital resources.

The Hybrid Futures Lab aims to illuminate the impact of digital technologies on the human and the nonhuman by researching how ways of existing are transformed by machines.

The lab's research focuses on to main lines of inquiry:

• The cognitive, epistemological and ontological implications of the encounter human-machine in the age of planetary computation, and how to re-imagine this encounter as a metastable ecology of the human and the non-human.
• The development of trans- and post-disciplinary approaches that uses post-qualitative enquiry and hybrid methodologies to study this epochal shift.

The Hybrid Futures Lab, ultimately, is a collaborative platform that asks questions around techno-digital futures.

As a forum to discuss, interrogate and experiment with ways to respond creatively and critically to the challenges technologies present today, it thrives on building connections, alliances and partnerships.

Members work with designers, philosophers, technicians, media theorists, artists, interaction designers, performers, engineers, software developers, coders, hackers, scientists. They are driven by a trans- and post disciplinary ethos, hybridisation, collegiality, and curiosity.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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University affiliation(s)

University of the Arts London
London