Abstract
This article examines hacking, understood as the alteration of an object’s function, as a queer and feminist design practice that disrupts normative relations between bodies and things. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist snap as a moment of rupture and reconfiguration, we define hacking as an embodied act of refusal that reconfigures everyday things. Through "Función Rota", an audiovisual research project that gathers product hacking scenes in movies, we identify hacking as a form of both critique and speculation: it reveals the normative logics embedded in things, while opening up the possibility of re-prototyping from below. Through feminist and queer frameworks, hacking emerges as a meta-design methodology that decentralises authorship, transforms apparently closed things into participatory ones, and reimagines artefacts as open-ended prototypes. The article proposes a perspective on hacking as a generative practice of queer world-making, cultivating plural material futures that extend beyond standardised design paradigms.
Keywords
queering design, product hacking, films, meta-design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1241
Citation
Carrasco Parodi, J., Menichinelli, M., and Espelt Estopà, G. (2026) Hacking as a queering design practice. Insights from a visual analysis of product hacking scenes in movies., in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1241
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Hacking as a queering design practice. Insights from a visual analysis of product hacking scenes in movies.
This article examines hacking, understood as the alteration of an object’s function, as a queer and feminist design practice that disrupts normative relations between bodies and things. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist snap as a moment of rupture and reconfiguration, we define hacking as an embodied act of refusal that reconfigures everyday things. Through "Función Rota", an audiovisual research project that gathers product hacking scenes in movies, we identify hacking as a form of both critique and speculation: it reveals the normative logics embedded in things, while opening up the possibility of re-prototyping from below. Through feminist and queer frameworks, hacking emerges as a meta-design methodology that decentralises authorship, transforms apparently closed things into participatory ones, and reimagines artefacts as open-ended prototypes. The article proposes a perspective on hacking as a generative practice of queer world-making, cultivating plural material futures that extend beyond standardised design paradigms.