FASHION-able: hacktivism and engaged fashion design, by Otto von Busch (doctoral thesis), University of Gothenburg, School of Design and Crafts.

Graphic design can be used to change behavior, and Otto von Busch offers some terrific insights into “design as a subversive act.”

Hacking is a wide practice, yet it can be condensed to some central points, as illustrated by social researcher Anne Galloway:

• Access to a technology and knowledge about it (“transparency”).
• Empowering users.
• Decentralizing control.
• Creating beauty and exceeding limitations.

Hacktivism is the merger between political activism and hacking. It is the modification of systems, programs or devices to give more users access to action spaces that were otherwise unavailable. These new passages and spaces are shared within the community for others to build further on.”

While the von Busch’s thesis is primarily focused on fashion design, his principles can be applied to the practice of graphic design; he outlines the practice of an engaged hacktivist designer as:

• Reawakening a spirit: Inspiring and boosting the thirst for exploration and emergence, expanding action spaces through simple examples, workshops and manuals to form new forms of attention and awareness.
• Giving voice to the silent: Creating a language of practice and also encouraging experiments in visual expression. To develop a critical usage of existing media channels as well as creating new ones.
• Going through informal channels: Bypass gatekeepers; find your own, low-level paths of action.
• Building self-reliance: Teaching simple modular methods or subsystems that can easily be expanded into other interventions and creations, developing a trust and courage in ones skills.
• Mobilizing resources: Reorganize production, open new action spaces by recirculating the existing ones. Use the possibilities of what is considered as junk, making the leftovers of society your pool of treasures.
• Provoking the “taken-for-grantedness”: Help to make the virtual or possible imaginable and discussable. Make models and visionary prototypes. Challenge the participants’ imagination.
• Making micro-plans: Think in small steps, plan small, but be open for serendipity. Make examples of how the single informal action might be turned into a stabilized activity and a sustainable project or business, at least resulting in richness of dignity and self-respect. Map relations and prototype protocols.
• Forming alliances: Engage participants, share resources and skills, collaborate and build assemblages together. Be a rhizome, a pack of wolves, a swarm of rats. But be conscious of its risks and take seriously the responsibilities it demands.
• Intensifying the power: Plug the project into a larger energy system, use its potentiality, connect with other lines and ride their shared power, boost the flows, accelerate the participation, celebrate a shared re-engagement.

To learn more or to get your copy of von Busch’s thesis, visit the University of Gothenburg.

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