Breaking and Making: An exploration of hacking and designing (with) technology

Throughout everyday life, people exhibit a remarkable aptitude for repurposing existing designs beyond their intended use. But in a world permeated with technology, engaging with existing design gets an additional dimension. Repurposing (with) technology offers a myriad of possibilities, but also poses significant challenges due to the need for specialized skills or expert knowledge. These challenges are also reflected in discourse: repurposing technology is not the domain of the amateur bricoleur, but of the expert hacker, a loaded term that – depending on the context – has various positive or negative connotations.

This design research project delves into the intricate relationship between hacking and design to explore how design can challenge the position of hacking as an expert practice. Combining theoretical arguments with hands-on design experiments, the different chapters in this thesis engage with several adjacent topics – from smart cities to air quality data to disassembly – that contribute perspectives on hacking beyond the two clichés of hacking as an illicit practice of breaking, and hacking as a commodified form of making.

Based on the design experiments that took place, three design strategies are formulated that challenge the position of hacking as an expert practice. These design strategies move beyond the popular imaginaries of hacking, towards critical collaborative engagements of breaking and making (with) technology. The first strategy, making visible, focusses on the design of speculative prototypes that highlight already existing but marginalized practices of hacking. The second strategy, making explorable, centres around the design of hacking tools that support stakeholders to explore and engage with broader societal issues. The third strategy, co-exploring, emphasizes the design of encounters where participants take existing devices apart to collaboratively express and explore issues related to design and technology. The design strategies and their accompanying articulations are intended for design researchers as well as design practitioners, offering bridges between the practical design experiments and the theoretical explorations that together formed the foundation of this PhD project.