ABSTRACT
The point of liberation sociology is not just to research the social world but to change it in the direction of expanded human rights, participatory democracy, and social justice. According to Koskinen et al, design researchers may want to experiment to see what is actually possible: “Researchers may want to show that a certain outcome is possible by building upon it, and there is no need to produce definitive proof beyond the construct”. The intervention also serves as a ‘provotype’, rather than prototype, as sketched out by interaction design researcher Preben Mogensen. Hacktivism could be said to be an emancipatory mode of bottom-up system design. Hacking means to open black boxes, reverse-engineer their circuitry and build a new ‘plug-in’ to the system, challenging it and releasing new capabilities from it. Hacktivist research aims to actualise the skills, control and systemic capabilities to the users and participants as a form of radical pedagogy.
