Gui Cavalcanti, writing in Make about the difference between various types of hardware coworking spaces:

To me, ‘hacking’ and ‘hacker’ are fundamentally exclusionary; whether they refer to the traditional act of programming to defeat or circumvent existing systems, or the act of working with physical parts, there’s a basic understanding that ‘hacking’ refers to a specific subset of activities that involve making existing objects do something unexpected.

I'm not sure I would have put this just so, but I think there's something interesting here.