Want to know how something works? Tear it apart. Along the way, you might learn to improve it or make it do something it was never intended to do. Although unconventional in the typical educational environment, such hardware hacking activities provide hands-on experience and a look into product design that cannot be learned from a textbook. The hardware hacking community represents an example of nontraditional learning and how the world can be changed for the better by unorthodox thinkers and their experiments.

Paper: Research Lessons from Hardware Hacking

Published in Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), 49(6):44-49, June, 2006.