The RSA has released an exceedingly well written and comprehensive article by Scott Burnham on the concept of design hacks, covering both the developed and the developing world. A snippet from the introduction by Emily Campbell, Director of Design.

The stereotypical designer - passionately authentic, famously unbending and always in black - is newly vulnerable to the interference of amateurs. The hard-won tryst between designer, manufacturer and intellectual property rights, likewise, has few defences against the open-source spirit and an internet wherein no secrets are hid. The brave ones embrace it. While cheerful design jam-sessions of professional and amateur go on in cities and design festivals all over the developed world, nothing changes in the favelas and rural villages where necessity has always been the mother of invention.

Hacking is the interference in, or corruption of, the authorship of designers and manufacturers, usually by amateurs. It happens right there in the space between the professional and the ordinary citizen that the is interested in. So we asked Scott Burnham: is design-hacking merely an introverted chapter in the history of design, or does it reveal civic ingenuity and resourcefulness that a century and a half of industrially-fed consumerism have masked? His answer persuasively describes the evolution of hacking from the digital to the analogue world and thence, with pregnant illustration, into the civic realm of streets and municipal regulations.

Photocredit: Meena Kadri on REculture