Anti-Environments is a hybrid web-to-print publication created in Google Sheets. It explores how alternative design processes and unconventional tools can challenge standard software conventions and reveal new creative possibilities through friction, experimentation, and the repurposing of digital media.

The publication explores how unconventional approaches to digital tools and alternative design processes can open up new creative potentials—leading to greater autonomy and experimental practices in working with digital media. The book is a collection of tools that challenge existing conventions and working methods in design. By deliberately engaging with points of resistance and limitations within software, habitual ways of using design tools are disrupted, creating space for new, unexplored creative processes.

The goal is to understand digital media not as inherently linear processes, but as dynamic, formative systems in which tools are not merely neutral aids, but can be used—and repurposed—as shaping media. The book presents numerous anti-environments, in which new design potentials are activated through the deliberate limitation and repurposing of digital tools. Anti-Environments itself is also such an “anti-environment”: it was not created using conventional design software but entirely in Google Sheets.

The book thus offers a new hybrid publication model, allowing readers to print and bind it themselves, while also being accessible as a website. This open concept examines Google Sheets not only as an unconventional potential for hybrid book design, but also as a democratic means of making and sharing knowledge.

Luis Adrian Borchardt
Alexander Roidl, Supervisor
Katja Davar, Supervisor