plementary forms of practice for shaping a new designer role for fashion. I have
called this role a “hacktivist” designer role and we will see throughout this thesis a
multiplicity of examples how it operates. This role is not the one of a classic unique
genius of fashion. Instead it is in the form of orchestrator and facilitator, as an
agent of collaborative change. It is not the divine creator of the original and new,
but a negotiator, questioning and developing design as a skill and practical produc-
tion utility. It is a role that purposefully works with experimentation in ascending
scales: starting at the kitchen table, exploring and developing skills, tools and hack-
ing energetic or material flows, then applying this to larger scale production and
projects. It is a combination of designing material artefacts as well as social proto-
cols.
We will follow these ascending scales through the following chapters. In the final
methodological appendix we will meet method lines that are intrinsic parts of a
new complementary designer role for fashion, one operating with employing the
abstract machine of hacktivism into their practice.
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It is important to notice that a “hacktivist” role includes a vital role that is central
when running socially engaged projects. It is the ability to be an intensifier. We
could shortly examine what this “intensifying” designer role could mean.
A key ability in an intensifying role lies in the capability to spot and reveal existing
potentialities and initiatives. These could be found by coincidence or by careful
mapping and systematic curiosity. These local initiatives are then supported and
amplified through situated practices and workshops with the aim of energizing
existing and emergent processes and intensities, promoting local potentialities.
Here the role of the designer becomes manifold. Both on a social level, facilitating
processes through practical organizing, and also on a craft level, a hands-on tool
provider, re-skilling teacher and blacksmith.
Yet, as the intensifier role meets the hacktivist a special quality emerges. Both that of
amplifying small local potentials, and that of reverse engineering a system to find
energies to plug a local initiative into the system at the best spot. It is a combination
of using infrastructure, material, skills and ideas that are all already existing – what
is needed is an extra energy and addition that pushes the situation through a phase
transition to that of a “higher order”, a better potential for change. A local situation
of low energy or intensity becomes unstable and enters a new phase, connecting
with other intensities but remains the same materially and locally and still within
control of the participants. This stresses interactions rather than independence
and it requires systems thinking instead of autonomy. The practice of the designer
is then close to that described as “metadesign”, the close interactions between or-
ganisms that support synergies and evolves more complex species and ecosystems
(Maturana 1997). This also means a practice engaged in the “the design of design”
that enables and sustains emergence between interacting parts or systems (Tham
& Jones 2008; Wood 2008).
An interesting parallel can be drawn with evolutionary biology. In theories of evo-
lution there is the term of symbiogenesis that describes a specific kind of coopera-
tive evolution pattern explored by biologist Lynn Margulis (Margulis 1998; Margu-
lis & Sagan 1995; Capra 1996). The symbiogenetic concept refers to the origin of
new forms of organisms by establishment of long-term or permanent symbiosis
(Margulis 1998: 6) This view shifts the emphasis of the evolutionary “survival of