Hacking the Light Fantastic

“Hacking means taking things that suck and making them better.” – Umair Haque

From Harvard Business Press blog writer Umair Haque: http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/05/last_week_i_asked_how.html

There are plenty of things that suck out there. So to continue with the lesson on education, standardized testing doesn’t allow for hacks. Yet hacks are some of the most useful methods for taking standardized items and putting them to better use. Hacks, after all, are the basis for mashups – the gestalt of taking multiple pieces and making the sum more powerful, useful and/or interesting. And it goes beyond software… Parent hacks, Ikea hacks, Bike hacks, , or cover your entire existence with Life Hacks.

As Umair’s column states, “Hackers play. Hackers don’t spend huge amounts of time learning in a structured way. The bigger the problem you’re focusing on, the more you’ll likely need to play to solve it. Big problems aren’t solved overnight, and they often can’t be solved in a tightly structured way. Hacking goes (way) beyond the limits of structured, rigid thinking.”

Hacking also allows for failure. It allows us to fail repeatedly, yet fail forward. Our hack failures get us closer to our goals. Why is hacking and failure important? Despite these ideas not being part of our education, they absolutely help us learn.

Without hacks, we wouldn’t have things like this:

(Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo. More about this video at Creative Review.)

The other day I overheard Shaun talking about a map API he was working with… he said, “well, I couldn’t get it to work with the documentation, so I built a hack to get around the issues I was having. Now it works great!” And that’s the point. Documentation tells how to implement something, but it doesn’t consider why you’re implementing it. Hacks are born to answer the question “why.”