The impact of computation on the planet, its inhabitants and resources can hardly be underestimated. This is not simply that over half of the world population is online, or that permanent connectivity has altered ways of accessing and processing information. It also concerns computation’s accelerated impact on wider ecologies of the human and the non-human: the environment, human cognition, ways of living, and the capacity to imagine technology-enabled sustained futures.

Discourses around technology tend to be highly deterministic, whether coloured by utopia (‘technology will save us’), or dystopia (‘machines will take over’). While there exists a vast and robust literature critiquing technology from perspectives such as Science and Technology Studies (STS), this has not percolated sufficiently within the area of design education and research where the latest technological innovation is often embraced and deployed without a sustained and systematic critical interrogation. This ‘critical technology literacy’ gap within design informs practitioners, outcomes and discourses that could otherwise be pivotal in shaping a different understanding of technologies and the techno-digital futures they are responsible for (Ito 2019).

Combining theoretical insights from the humanities (STS, philosophy of technology) and from a range of design fields (product, industrial, spatial, communication), the Hybrid Futures project assembles a transdisciplinary team of international scholars, practitioners and experts to address the knowledge gap within design education, research and practice, and to catalyse the production of critically informed design interventions that can enrich the debate about techno-digital futures. The proposed activities (two workshops, a public colloquium and a student showcase) establishing the Hybrid Futures Lab at Central Saint Martins (CSM), University of the Arts London (UAL), will engage academic faculty, technology experts, industry partners and graduate students in a collaboration to produce creative and critical design responses to how technologies and the digital are shaping human and non-human futures.