Our Hybrid Future Has Arrived

From classrooms to offices, the way we handle new combinations may define our era.

Ever since a horse and donkey were nudged into producing the first mule, the hybrid has been one of humanity’s most radical acts of design. And for five thousand years since, hybrids have remained a tempting target for ingenuity. Designers of all stripes have pondered: How can we bend the natural order to achieve a combination greater than the sum of its parts?

Some results have proven undeniably outstanding. Picture an ear of sweet corn on a hot July afternoon, for instance, washed down with a key lime gimlet. Other experiments, like that humble mule, have produced something unremarkable but still useful, even if we no longer use them in combat. And a handful of hybrids are just gratuitous and wrong. Looking at you, purple broccolini.

A year ago, most of us viewed the hybrid as something of a cultural trifle. The term probably brought to mind the well-intentioned Prius, essentially a mule on wheels. We might have recalled a battery-powered bicycle for those fed up with the rigor of pedaling, or a new strain of cannabis peddled by an earnest Belushi-caliber entrepreneur. Design accomplishments, to be sure, but hardly the stuff of societal revolution.