I love hacking. I love the challenge of it, the subversiveness of it, and the way in which it turns the world into a playground. Hacking is the art of dismantling and reassembling to alter the intended purpose, and I'm a big believer in the value of doing things you're not supposed to. It can be useful and noble, of course, but the real reason we mash things up and make new stuff is because it creates a happy chemical reaction in our brains.

However worthy our goals may be, without fun we have very little to keep us going. I'm interested in things because they're interesting, not because they self-describe as technology or art. I was one of the technologists selected for the Happenstance programme last year – a Digital R&D Fund pilot project that placed techies in arts organisations around the UK – and I have recently joined London creative technology agency Caper as an associate.

Back in January 2011, I attended the first ever Culture Hack Day, produced by Caper, bringing together the culture and technology sectors' shared passion for creativity. The event was inspired by the extraordinary enthusiasm demonstrated by developers at hack days, popular events that see teams of technologists challenged to build quick prototypes out of data within a very limited time frame.

These are thrillingly geeky affairs, with caffeine-powered participants often sketching up the beginnings of genuinely useful tools. Matthew Somerville's Train Times hack, for example, was a product of Science Hack Day, and uses live data from TfL to show where London Tube trains are underground.

So, two years ago, in a spacious advertising agency in east London, several cultural organisations (including the Royal Opera House, National Maritime Museum and Crafts Council) agreed to open up their data for developers to play with, and numerous arts and culture representatives, technologists and creatives turned up for talks, networking and 24 hours of hard work. What really excited me was the sense of fun, the theatrical spectacle of the occasion and the injection of experimentation. The Culture Hack concept seemed to strike a chord, and requests for similar events started coming in from all over the world.

Culture Hack has now evolved into a digital development programme, enabling the creation of innovative digital prototypes and new working relationships across the arts, technology and creative industries. More recently experimenting with different formats that sit under the Culture Hack banner to create a broader programme of work, the programme now includes hack days, workshops, prototype commissions and how-to guides.

We recently hosted an inaugural 'Ideas Lab' – a one-day event commissioned by A New Direction, looking at how young people could better access London's museums and archives using technology. The Inventive City lab was a facilitated workshop, inspired by the hack day structure but accessible to those who aren't experienced software developers.

Rather than developers reconstructing arts data, the 'hackers' were museum and archive experts and creative technologists working together. Instead of building digital prototypes from specific data sets, they spent the day developing digital ideas on paper that made good use of their organisations' assets. I'd say that besides the always-useful brainstorming exercises, the great advantage for me was to be able to work with so many culture professionals and talk honestly with them, off the record, about the things they did and didn't need from digital.

As with many of Caper's projects, the Ideas Lab method involves risk; it asks you to have faith in the value of the process without always having a goal in mind. By bringing culture professionals and technology experts together in a fast, hacky way, the aim is to develop ideas that extend outside of comfort zones and encourage ideas and processes that can be taken away and shared.

On 26 and 27 February 2013, we will be holding another Ideas Lab as part of Culture Hack East, with Anglia Ruskin University, funded by Arts Council England. Participants will develop new digital ideas and produce paper prototypes in cross-sector teams, based on key challenges for the arts, culture and heritage sectors. There will also be the opportunity to discuss ideas with a panel of industry experts, and to win a bursary to develop an idea into a fully working, user tested digital prototype. You can find out more about it here.

We are developing a Culture Hack toolkit as well: a downloadable document, giving case studies of prototypes, workshop formats, and the steps towards becoming a regional delivery partner. We're also aiming to produce a major event this autumn in London, bringing together all the best ideas so far from the Culture Hack programme – let us know if you want to be involved!

Leila Johnston is an associate at Caper – follow her on Twitter @finalbullet and Caper @wearecaper

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, sign up free to become a member of the Culture Professionals Network.