Playful Hacking within Research-through-Design

Research-through-design has gained popularity in recent years within HCI communities. This has followed with attempts to methodize and formalize design practices within research contexts. These attempts have been criticized as being poorly suited for design. As an exemplification of unstructured methods benefiting design research, we present playful hacking within research-through-design. In this paper we share findings from two years of using this approach as part of research-through-design. In our approach, hacking is inspired by play and conducted within an office as a hacker's playground environment. We have found playful hacking to generate outcomes such as improved collaboration, exploration, and discussion while also generating unanticipated outcomes such as reusable design work and pre-study findings. Above all, we found that hacking provided motivation and invigoration to do more making and research in general.