Designers as curators, user as designers: a reflective study of hacking and curation to extend interaction design practice

This thesis examines the evolving relationship between users and designers: I examine user participation in design and the changing role of designers in order to elucidate how a new understanding of these roles can transform Interaction Design processes. This research is grounded in the theory of Donald Schön’s notion of the reflective practitioner, in turn casting the act of designing and reflecting as central to the orientation of the research. This work builds on empirical material from an extensive field study that examines a community of open source developers (“hackers”) and presents a series of vignettes illustrating experiential accounts of their practice. I brought this community together through the creation of a festival dedicated to creative re-appropriation of technology called “Tweak”. By reflecting on my own practice of design facilitator for these communities, and by discussing in detail the changing relationship between these actors in design, I propose curating as a methodology of potential use within Interaction Design, whereby designers can act as facilitators to engage users in design, rather than providing them with fixed solutions.