Hacking Design

By Avinash Rajagopal

What if you could press a button and have a machine build you any product you wanted? What if we all had the means to modify our physical environment, to tweak and subvert objects produced for us by designers and manufacturers? A new generation of hardware hackers is making steady progress toward making these hypotheses reality, building vibrant communities in the process. And designers are experimenting with open-source creation and customization, trying to come to terms with the hackers’ visions of the future. Hacking Design examines the conflicts and commonalities between hackers and professional designers, and uncovers shared ground on which the two creative communities can work together.

DesignFile is the new line of e-books on topics and trends in design published by the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. There will be six to twelve titles published annually, each ranging in length from 7,500 to 20,000 words. Building a consortium with institutional partners and design practitioners, Cooper-Hewitt's series will bridge the academic, museum, design, and publishing worlds. Inaugural members of the e-book consortium are Parsons The New School for Design and the School of Visual Arts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DesignFile
• Release date: Jan 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9780910503624

Book preview

Rajagopal.png

Hacking Design

By Avinash Rajagopal

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution

Copyright © 2011 by Avinash Rajagopal

All rights reserved.

To my sister Ambica

The task of transforming is the only course through which knowledge may be obtained.

—Enzo Mari, Industrial Designer

I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.

—R. Buckminster Fuller, Design Visionary

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The Almost Reproductive Robot

2. A Hacked World

3. A Timeless Auto-Project

4. Beyond Doing It Yourself

5. From Bits and Atoms

6. Open Ecotopias

Bibliography

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Notes

List of Illustrations

Colophon

Introduction

What if you could press a button and have a machine build you any product you wanted? What if the knowledge that has long been the domain of engineers and industrial designers were freely available? What if all of us had the means and the know-how to modify our physical environment, to tweak and subvert the objects produced for us by designers and manufacturers?

A new generation of hardware hackers, more concerned with manipulating physical materials than cracking codes, is concerning itself with precisely these questions, and is making steady progress towards new models of production and consumption. These hackers have developed low-cost 3D printers, organized in hackerspaces, and built vibrant and creative communities, both online and offline.

Designers have not remained indifferent to this phenomenon. There are already several cases of cross-pollination where designers have experimented with open source creation and customization, trying to come to terms with the hacker’s vision of the future.

This book will examine both common histories and persisting misunderstandings between hackers and professional designers. By digging deeper into how designers have come to terms with DIY and hacking, I hope to uncover shared ground on which the two creative communities can work together.

1. The Almost Reproductive Robot

So, we were promised flying cars, complained Bre Pettis to an amused audience at the technology conference Gnomedex in August 2009. We were promised space colonies! We were promised jet packs! And we were promised a machine to make anything we wanted!­ An image of the Replicator machine from Star Trek: Next Generation popped up on the screen. I can’t really do anything about the first three yet, Pettis went on, but I’ve got the 3D printer part nailed. And I’ve made it so you can do it too.¹

The Star Trek Replicator was a shiny white box that used some alchemy of subatomic particles to magically materialize objects.² The 3D printer Pettis is talking about isn’t quite as slick. The Cupcake CNC, sold by Makerbot Industries, is a dinky little wooden cube with its innards—multicolored wires, metal rods, and oversized bolts—proudly on display. A long plastic filament, also supplied by Makerbot Industries, is fed into a heated nozzle that melts the plastic and prints it onto a moving platform. The motion of the platform can be guided by any 3D computer model, even one made on Google’s free Sketchup software. Laying one line of molten plastic on top of another, the Cupcake CNC Makerbot converts the virtual model into a real object, all the while sounding exactly like an old dot matrix printer.

If you take the really long view, one beginning of the Makerbot story—the creation of a machine that can in turn create all the other objects that fill our lives, including, therefore, more machines like itself—is in seventeenth-century Sweden. The philosopher René Descartes, invited by Queen Christina to her court, was explaining the finer points of his latest book, The Passions of the Soul. One of his arguments was that the human body could be regarded as a machine. The skeptical Queen’s response was that a machine could never do certain things that a human body can—make babies, for instance. She famously pointed to a clock and said, "See to it that it