Hacking Design : Folly, theft or a new democratic dawn?

14th Oct 2009; 18:00

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“Hacking” originally denoted audacious and illegal breaches of closed systems of electronic communication, but increasingly invokes a broader range of stunts and sabotages of security and convention.

It has also entered the language of design criticism. The stereotypical designer – passionate, unbending and always in black – is newly vulnerable to the interference of amateurs. And the hard-won tryst between designer, manufacturer and intellectual property rights has few defences against the open-source culture and an ungovernable internet.

Brave designers embrace this new frontier spirit. Design jam sessions of professional and amateur in cities and festivals all over the developed world unlock a creative energy that has, in fact, been ever-present in favelas and rural villages where necessity has always been the mother of invention.

Is design-hacking merely another post-modern phase in the history of design, or does it reveal a civic ingenuity and resourcefulness that a century and a half of industrially-fed consumerism has masked?

Otto von Busch “haute-couture heretic and DIY-demagogue” visits the RSA to present his extensive series of projects that experiment with the reverse-engineering, hacking, tuning and sharing of fashion as a form of social activism.

Respondents: Colin McDowell, fashion editor, The Sunday Times, Paul Thompson, Rector, the Royal College of Art and David Godber, an automotive designer and deputy CEO, Design Council.

Chair: Scott Burnham, author of the RSA Design & Society pamphlet on design-hacking.

Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #rsadesign

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