Interactions - March/April 2008

How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Hackers
Carla Diana

Georgia Institute of Technology | carla@carladiana.com

[ 1] Saffo, Paul, “Farewell Information, It’s a Media Age,” December 2005. Saffo.com. http://www. saffo.com/essays/ essay_farewellinfo.pdf (Dec 2007)

[ 2] Davis, Joshua “Dynamic Abstraction.” Presentation at the Flash on the Beach conference, Brighton, U. K., November 5, 2007.

March + April 2008

Designers are a unique breed: We take pride in our flexible attitude and ability to be disciplinary ambassadors, but we are often so easily seduced by process that we can get set in our ways. Though having a strong sense of what “designerly” means is an important aspect of creating professional results, focusing too closely on this definition may prevent us from embracing work that doesn’t quite appeal to our sensibilities. The current hacker-inspired DIY movement is an example of this, and this ground-swell of activity has become too important to be ignored.

As disciplinary boundaries blur and we approach what forecaster Paul Saffo describes as a “creator’s economy” [ 1], we as designers face an interesting situation where there may actually be more creativity happening around us than there is inside our own offices and studios. This peripheral activity may not be design in a traditional sense (or in a billable sense), but in some ways it actually embodies the exploratory spirit of design better than our own professional practice. Are these emerging hacker-explorers starting to outcreate the creatives?

to speak about the patterns he had recently incorporated into his work [ 2]. Davis was an American guest lecturer invited specifically to expound upon his appreciation of Japanese graphic motifs. The moral of the story was familiar: It sometimes takes an outsider to point out something that is right under our noses. Though these were the very patterns that appeared on the floors and tile work that his hosts could see every day in or near their own homes, it took an outsider to truly celebrate them.

I had a similar experience when I first moved to San Francisco in 2005. In addition to the Bay Area being a hotbed of geek culture, it was a pivotal time in product-design history—when the confluence of broadband availability, wireless internet access, and ubiquitous screens made the “smart products” that we dreamt up in utopian student projects and hypothetical design scenarios a reality. In my new home I was thrilled to see the roles of artists, designers, and technologists so seamlessly blur into one another through local events and collaborative projects. At the same time, I was stunned to see how little attention my colleagues in the interaction-design world paid to it. In their eyes, I was off to my “funny little meetings” to hang out with the geeks and the hack-

ers and their current curiosities, but I certainly didn’t see my collection of extracurricular activities as particularly out of place. In fact, I believed these activities to be must-see examples of design exploration. They were exuberant displays of visionary exercises. They were elegant slices of innovative thought, and they had everything to do with contemporary design practice.

DIY Renaissance Fast-forward a couple of years, and I can see that there is more awareness among design firms of how hacker-inspired art and technology efforts can provide an excellent playground for inspiration and experiments in cultural change. Nonetheless, there is still a reluctance to seek this inspiration on a regular basis. In the meantime the creative geek/ hacker/tinkerer subculture has exploded, and the technological DIY spirit that was once the almost exclusive domain of the Bay Area and elite technology institutions has spread to cities throughout the world.