From Design To Hacktion

Fabrique | Hacktion designs small-sized objects to twist and improve urban and collective spaces. Recharges for mobile phones rehabilitate declining phone boxes. Grafted to public walls, coat racks create hospitable places. Light signals on top of train ticket machines enable the travelers to check the state of the terminal from a distance.

Fabrique | Hacktion is run by 3 students of Les Ateliers-Paris Design Institute (ENSCI). The technologies of the school Fab-Lab allows them to create quick scale prototypes and light custom-build pieces, and to quicken the process between the idea and the action. Besides their poetic and political interventions, they encourage urban dwellers to download the detail sheets of their objects for free, improve them and produce them (at the ENSCI Fab-Lab?).

I hope such open source and DIY movements will help to develop new standards of design and new behaviours in the city. But I still have the impression this revolution involves niche audiences, more professionals than amateurs. If you took part in open-source workshops or if you are an incubator like Fabrique | Hacktion, Waag (Amsterdam), or Open Design City (Berlin), please shout, I’d love to read your story.

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