It’s instinctive to more and more of us, if something doesn’t work properly, it needs improving !
I mean, why would you live with niggles and annoyances when you can do a better job?
And if you can imagine a better design, why not just go ahead and make it?
Plus. There’s the post-hack basking in the glory of your cleverness and handiness.

The more people that improve and redesign their own stuff, the more other people can see their ideas and improvements, and eventually designers and manufacturers will start to take notice and the improvements that we make may start to influence the next generation of products, so maybe it’ll contribute to crowdsourcing design insights. That would be awesome!
Even more exciting than that though, is spreading the culture of problem solving, of taking action and improving. If we think like that about the stuff we live with, there’s a good chance we’ll be in a problem solving / improving frame of mind and can apply that to bigger and more important problems too.

Here are some cool design-improving hacks that people have done recently:
Gunnar from Germany made his ipod shuffle work better: “I hate the fact that you can only use the bad apple earphones with the ipod shuffle because the controls for the mp3player are built into the headphones cable. Since i wanted to use my normal headphones, i resoldered the apple headphones and insulated the wires using sugru. Now i can plug anything to it and still use the apple controls”

I’m guessing the second headphones was to eliminate wires between ipod and headphones – which is an awesome project! – but I don’t know for sure – Gunnar is that right?

David in Seattle made his camera work better: “I’ve always had a hard time turning on my Canon S90 camera because the power button is the same size and shape as the function button so you have to really look at it to know which one you are pressing.” Nice one David!

Marcel from the Netherlands improved his car straps to protect his car: “I hacked my tie down straps on the side flanks to protect my car roof while strapping tight my kayak. You can be as careful as possible but the metal fasteners will sometimes scrape the paint off your car and damage it.”

Cay improved the design of her tent pegs! “I like to travel light so I don’t carry a hammer to drive them home. My solution is to put a soft sugru top on my tent pegs – much easier on my hands ”