Hybrid Relics: Socially Embedding the Soul in Design

This project will address key questions concerning new social computing paradigms for designing hybrid products and how we might engage with hybridity using different design approaches. We take the notion of the ‘relic‘ as a provocation, an approach to developing and experimenting in design and use the term ‘soul‘ not because we aim to understand existence, but to emphasise the way that objects relate back to a ‘lived’ experience.

Earlier work examined the role of technologies in the guitar relic’ing community, envisioning how hybrid-relic guitars could could serve to provoke a response that would enable consideration towards the design of hybrid products and services. This work led to discussions with other disciplines in music, history, the digital humanities and robotics about the concept of the ‘relic’.  This project will now bring these disciplines together to understand the different ways in which HCI, technology and the arts/humanities can work together to inform new approaches to design.

Project partners: The Bate Collection & BeLa

Project start date 1.10.2023 – 30.9.2024

Hybrid Relics: Socially Embedding the South in Design is a Horizon Agile Round 3 project

Introduction blog, mid blogs here & here

More on the project here