ABSTRACT
Design designates; it guides and leads us towards specific types of behaviors. Designers serve to defend and propel the interests of the client, who wants to lead their customers or users into a relationship of dependence and addiction. Through the clever use of devices, apparatuses and affordances, design sorts and consolidates human behaviors to propel the status quo. However, there can be many forms of resistances, and one form is hacking – the manipulation of the mechanisms which guide and exclude, such as locks. In this way, the craft of manipulation is the central feat of hacking. It is the material intervention of trespassing into systems in order to change and tune them towards becoming counter-systems. This text examines how hacking can be used to manipulate systems of exclusion into more inclusive systems; affecting the designed guidance devices in order to propel both sustainability and social justice.
