Hello everyone, I'm just looking for the clicker

which is here. I'm super delighted and honored to be here today. My name is Silve Lindner, as you might guess from my name. I'm actually born and raised in Austria, but I currently live in the United States. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, School of Information and Art and Design.

And today, as Michael was already saying, I will be talking about something that you might have heard of more recently that many people have begun stipulating that we live in something called an age of the maker movement. So what is the maker movement? So many people think about when they think about making, they think about spaces like the following.

This is a photo of a maker space in China. It's actually China's first maker space that opened up its doors in Shanghai in 2010. And a maker space, as you might have guessed from the name is a space where people come together to make things. They share the tools and machines to do so and they tinker together and make things

and include, for example, experiments in robotics. This is a swarm robot that the team of the Shanghai Makerspace built in 2011 and that they submitted to a competition where they won second place, couched between Harvard and MIT. But people also make other things in maker spaces like, for example, prototypes of aquaponic planting

or interactive urban designs. And many times, people who go and hang out in maker spaces they also present their work at maker fairs like the one in Berlin, for example. Many people, when they think about the maker movement, they think about this particular device. This is the Arduino, it's a microcontroller platform

that came out of a collaboration at the Iberia Design School around 2006. And this is the device really that is today often named as sort of the quintessential device that enabled the rise of a global maker movement. So what it allows you to do in a nutshell is to tinker with hardware.

So it allows you to tinker with hardware, especially if you don't have a degree in engineering or computer science. So it was basically a tool designed for designers, for artists, and anyone else who doesn't necessarily have a training in electronic engineering. And this really helped proliferate ideas and practices of making this tiny device that fits into the palm of your hand.

So what I've shown you so far are basically different examples of what people have begun to associate with a promise of making. So much of when people are excited about making they think of making as presenting them with the tools and methods to intervene in established structures,

be they societal structures or technological structures. So the idea of the maker movement is really to give people the tools and to empower them to intervene in, for example, corporate monopolies. So rather than buying the latest iPhone, you would be empowered to build your own phone. So that's sort of the fundamental promise and idea behind making.

So this goes back to makers sort of positioning their work as a sort of revival of the early 1960s and 70s internet and hacker counterculture of California. It also includes making being seen as a form of novel engagement with new materials. So on the screen here is the lily pads

that allows you to hack fabrics. And making is also associated with providing new ways of challenging established gender norms. So this is, for example, a photo of a feminist hacker space in Vienna. But making has also received much broader attention. So this is a photo of the maker fair

that was hosted at the White House under the Obama administration. So making has also been celebrated as a way to reinvent national identity and, in this case, bring back made in America, as Obama so famously put it. But making has also been associated with re-envisioning citizenship

and empowering citizens in new ways. And all of this, what I've shown you so far, really comes down to two things. So making took rise at a moment when especially in Europe and the United States, people began to talk about and critique the rise of precarious work and labor, not only for people working in, let's say, factories,

but also the rise of precarious work conditions for people in the creative industries. So making took rise at a moment when people began, so not just scholars, but also media, public media, and people working in the tech industry began critiquing the earlier visions and ideas of the knowledge economy

and saying the knowledge economy, or ideas like the creative class as propagated by Richard Florida, were sharply critiqued because they delivered, they did not deliver what they had originally promised. So making, the promise of making and what ideas began to, what people began to associate with making really took rise at this moment of a broader critique of established structures,

including neoliberal governance and precarious work. So that was the first thing. The second thing is that this promise of making that I've already told you about was really couched in a way to provide people the means to intervene in the pitfalls of this information society. And as you can see here on the screen, there was just these various examples

of people in making, challenging who gets to do technology innovation, that this was maybe something only for men, or that the notion here was really that everyone can do it, so the slogan of the Maker Faire, for example, is everyone can be a maker. So that is sort of the promise of making, that it provides the concrete tools

and methods to intervene. But then we might stop and hesitate here for a second and ask, whose empowerment is this? So even though on the one hand, we see how women in the maker scene have really challenged established gender norms in the tech industry, and making has also provided an opportunity

for politicians and everyday citizens to engage with one another. But on the other hand, we still see how many maker spaces are largely male-dominated, how most of the people who end up being celebrated at make magazines are dads with their sons, tinkering with robotics and so on. So even though making is couched as a promise

to intervene in established structures, it is still a fairly exclusive project that continues exclusions that have actually also happened before. So there's kind of a contradiction there, right? On the one hand, there's this vision that is very, very powerful to intervene in established structures, and on the other hand, the reality in practice often looks very, very different.

So what I want to do today is basically look at a maker culture that isn't as well known as the one I've just shown you. So what you see on the screen are really very familiar models of creative practice when you are sitting somewhere in Europe or the United States. So it's kind of a Western view of making.

And I want to show you today an alternative to how we can think about creative production and technology practice and making in particular. And to do so, I want to take you to a city in the south of China. Can I get somebody in the audience tell me

where this particular place is or what the city is? Yes, I see your hand. Yes, so this is the city of Shenzhen. You might not see it very clearly, but here is a map and it's just, this is Hong Kong. And so the city of Shenzhen is just north of Hong Kong. And I'm talking about Shenzhen because I've conducted research in China,

mostly ethnographic over the last seven years. And this research in China started out with me spending a lot of time in the early hacker and maker spaces in China, but then took me in 2012 to the city of Shenzhen. At that time, a lot of attention suddenly moved to Shenzhen, especially in the maker scene, in the maker movement in China.

So to most people, Shenzhen is known, if it is known at all, through images like this. So this is a photo of the Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn that produces, for example, for companies like Apple and HP. So Shenzhen is the place where more than 90% of our electronic devices are being designed and made.

So the Apple phone in your pocket or the computer in front of you was made there. But more recently, another image of Shenzhen began taking shape. So this is a screenshot of a 2015 Wired documentary that came out of the UK. And you might see the headline here. So Shenzhen, the same city that was largely known

as a state of production and cheap labor is now celebrated as a Silicon Valley of hardware. So we might wanna ask what happened here? And in order to understand what happened in this sort of transition from people not knowing Shenzhen or just knowing there's a state of cheap labor towards a Silicon Valley for hardware, we have to go back about 30 years ago.

So the kind of city we know today, Shenzhen, as a 22-people metropolis that produces our iPhones and other devices, was a very, very different place 30 years ago. It was mostly agriculture, but was declared in the 1980s by Deng Xiaoping as an experiment.

So this region, you can see Deng Xiaoping here, was meant to help China transition or experiment with the transition of opening reforms and experimenting with a mode of capitalism and what that would mean for China. So this happened in the 80s. China began opening up towards foreign direct investment

through Shenzhen. So this began with investment from Hong Kong and Taiwan first and later during the outsourcing boom in Europe and the United States also attracted investors from the West. And so to say, the model was a success and capitalism expanded to the rest of China. So what happened in the years to follow

was really an expansion of the manufacturing industry in the south of China. So this was in the 1990s, basically with the expansion of original design manufacturing and large contract manufacturing. So the best known example that's probably familiar to most of you

is the HTC phone, which was basically a phone brand that was owned by the manufacturer themselves. So the first time an original design manufacturing process that took shape in Shenzhen. But what is less well known about what happened in Shenzhen at the same time as large contract manufacturing grew in size

is a culture of informal production, an entrepreneurial culture applied to manufacturing. This culture is very often referred to in Chinese as zhan zhai. So zhan zhai translates into English something like mountain fortress and has a little bit of a Robin Hood flavor to it.

So when people think about zhan zhai, they often think about these stories of 108 rebels who were hiding in the mountains and taking from the emperor and giving to the poor. So it's kind of like a Robin Hood spirit of like sophisticated rebels who basically intervene in the establishment. So this term began being applied to an informal production culture

that began growing as these large contract manufacturers began producing for Apple and so on. So how you can think about this is this all began in Hong Kong when family owned businesses started to produce copycat retail like the following, like the copycat Nike shoe and the copycat Gucci bag.

These factories migrated to Shenzhen with the rise of electronic production and some of those items were produced in Shenzhen in the similar kind of spirits. What you see here on the screen are actually mobile phones. These are feature phones that come in unique shape and sizes. And the idea here that these entrepreneurs in manufacturing had was

that there was a gap in the global economy as the large scale contract manufacturers were producing for Apple and Nokia, nobody was catering for niche markets of people who couldn't afford necessarily a cool phone. So these phones were basically designed for migrant communities, migrant workers who could otherwise not have access to another phone

and this later expanded to new kinds of creations. So you can see here on the screen, for example, a phone on the right, that's also at the same time a radio and a flashlight or the one on the left, for example, shaped like a Chinese alcohol bottle or this is my favorite.

I found this three years ago in the markets of Shenzhen and the vendor sort of was joking that this was the latest iPhone 6. I bought it, so. But more recently, this informal economy that has built around manufacturing in Shenzhen has also began partnering with other regions. So this, for example,

is a smartphone produced for the African market. Techno Mobile is now one of the largest phone brands in Africa and this phone comes with a special feature as the advertisement here tells as well. It comes as it says capture the beauty of darkness, comes equipped with a camera that captures dark-skinned subjects

particularly well in low-light conditions. So this is a very affordable smartphone designed for a very specific market and this kind of product design came out of this very informal kind of piracy, copycat kind of culture in Shenzhen that is now really a billion dollar industry. So I was curious in my research to understand

what enabled these entrepreneurs to work in such ways, like what actually shaped their practice. And what I found was an open source culture that was applied to manufacturing. So what you see here on the screen is the boards that goes into producing a mobile phone. In this case, this is an older featured phone device

and basically this board here, the resources, the bill of material, everything that goes into designing this board is publicly shared amongst the manufacturing and factory entities in Shenzhen. So you can kind of compare this open manufacturing board to the Arduino. It's basically an open source platform

but applied to mass production, applied to manufacturing. So they kind of share the same spirit but one is typically the one on the left. The Arduino board is usually celebrated now as the enabler of the maker movement, as the enabler of new forms of creative practice, as a very cutting edge innovation kind of piece versus very few people know about the board on the right.

Most people think about the board on the right as being part of a copycat industry that doesn't have anything to do with innovation. And why I'm contrasting these two here is to really show you that because the reason why we don't see the one on the right as innovative has much to do with our own perception of what we think counts as counterculture,

of what we think counts as innovation or intervention into the established quo. So basically what the board on the right represents is a kind of intervention that happens through product design. So the Shenzhen producer, these informal entrepreneurs and manufacturers were able to intervene in established structures

to say it's not only Apple that can produce products that will be successful in a large-scale market, we can do the same thing. We, these small-scale entrepreneurs in China who have now really grown in size. So again, I wanted to come back to this image of Shenzhen.

So Shenzhen is today celebrated as a Silicon Valley of hardware. And I argue it's celebrated as such by magazines like Wired, not because it is necessarily like Silicon Valley, the one in the United States, but because it's actually in many ways different and unique. So when people who are active in the maker industry,

when they go to Shenzhen these days, they don't go there because it looks like Silicon Valley or it acts like Silicon Valley because then they could just stay in Silicon Valley. They go there because of this unique Shenzhen open manufacturing culture. They go there because they see in Shenzhen and in this informal practice a kind of promise to intervene

in the structures that they find are harder to intervene in the United States or in Europe. So especially what I've witnessed over the last year is that a lot of European makers, designers, and artists, as well as American makers, designers, and artists go to Shenzhen because they see a possibility to intervene exactly because Shenzhen still concentrates

the kind of production culture, the kind of messy informal slash formal kind of design and manufacturing practices that the West has replaced with the build up of a knowledge and information economy. And so they kind of see a promise concentrated in Shenzhen's ability to point to a past

that the West, so to say, has given up. And so you see this represented in articulations like the following. So this is a quote from Joy Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab. The MIT Media Lab has now a collaboration with the city of Shenzhen. So they take those students to Shenzhen, mostly the students in engineering,

to learn from Shenzhen. And Joy Ito, the director, went himself, and this is what he said after he returned. He said, what was happening in Shenzhen? They were not making PowerPoints or prototypes. They were fiddling with the manufacturing equipment and innovating rights there on the factory floor. The kids in Shenzhen make new cell phones

like the kids in Palo Alto make websites. So there's a rain force of innovation going on. What you thought you could only do with software they're doing with hardware. And a similar quote from Dale Dougherty, who is like one of the key figures in the Western maker movement. He started Make Magazine and Make Media. He was in Shenzhen in 2014, and I interviewed him when he was there,

and he was saying the following. He was saying, I started Maker Faire in Detroit, and one of the events I did the first year I had makers come up to me and they'd say, well, I live in the manufacturing capital of America, but I can't get things made. So part of this American manufacturing is geared towards large companies, and for smaller entities, it's much harder to get access to them.

And then he goes on to explain, but Shenzhen is different. Shenzhen is a place that represents still where a lot of things get made. So you can still have access to these kinds of infrastructures and production sites there. And what we see here is that Shenzhen in these articulations of especially Western, European, and American makers,

Shenzhen came to be seen at a moment where people began to really talk about the ramifications of earlier visions of the information society, of the knowledge economy, like neoliberal governance and precarious work in labor. As people were talking and critiquing these systems in place, they saw promise in Shenzhen,

because Shenzhen hadn't yet turned into the same kind of knowledge economy that they had seen on the rise in the West. So Shenzhen became seen, so to say, as an ideal laboratory to prototype alternative futures. And so I just wanted to return for a moment to where I began my talk. Typically we think about the maker movement as a very hopeful kind of practice

that intervenes in existing structures, right? And a lot of that has really, in some ways, remained an idea and an ideal that I think many of us support. Many of us do believe in the idea that with opening up established structures and exposing how things work from the inside out, we can actually change how people think about the world

and how they engage with the world, right? And basically what happened is a lot of the people who were driven to do this saw Shenzhen as a place where they could actually do that on a larger scale. So rather than doing it in a maker space or in a hacker space where it remained, where the intervention happened perhaps more on a prototypical level or where the intervention remained within the kinds of fairly elite practices.

If you are in a maker space, most likely you have a higher degree. Most likely you're not a factory worker. So the opportunity that people saw in Shenzhen was that it made them directly engage with the kind of factory work, with the kind of people who produced these devices of which we actually know very little of these days.

So Shenzhen in that sense came to be seen as a place where especially people in the West can see a future, can see an alternative that was much, much harder to see in established centers like Silicon Valley, for example. And with this, I would like to thank you and take any questions from the audience.

Silvio, do I see any questions? Yes, there's the first question. Perfect. You will get a microphone. Here we go.

Wow, Silvio, thank you so much for the talk. It's really great. And I happened to just came back from Shenzhen not long ago that when you talk about this alternative future thing that how Shenzhen is rendered is different image of the different future. What I like to know is, is this really the alternative future? Because what we do know is it's still based in China

that there is this governmental kind of interference into the maker scene now, ever since Li Keqiao, the prime minister, has visited the maker spaces and made this a kind of a gender of China ever since 2014. And do you think this would actually change the flavor of Shenzhen from this point onwards?

And is this really the alternative future? Or also, I guess, is the future land for Shenzhen specifically? So that's a great question. So what Ding is referring to is that just as the Obama administration was very, very supportive of making and the European Union also has supported

maker-related internet of things practices, the Chinese government has become really excited about making. And has begun endorsed officially making as part of a new policy called loosely translated into English, mass making, mass innovation. And the idea behind that is that making will enable citizens to become entrepreneurial.

So citizens will be empowered to start their own businesses. So it's a very similar kind of vision to what we see in the United States of what gets politicians excited about making. So Ding's question is about does this kind of political endorsement of making change the very flavor of making? And in some ways it does.

What I found fascinating to see in China is that from its inception, the maker movement was very much so invested in intervening from within. So a lot of the people who started China's first maker spaces began actually working with policy makers, began talking to politicians.

And this is a strategy and tactic that you see often in China where political protest and resistance often comes in the nature of a more parasitic kind of engagement where people are rather than outright opposing the system, because that's really hard to do, they intervene from within and they intervene from within these established structures.

And so actually the kinds of terms that the Chinese government is using today for making the Chinese terms were actually invented by the makers themselves. So you see this really interesting, symbiotic, parasitic relationship between citizen and government. And Zhen Zhen again is an interesting example here because Zhen Zhen, as I mentioned in the beginning,

was really an experiment where the government on the one hand declared top down that this region should be the place where China's modernization project has been implemented. And then there was a lot of top down urban planning that happened later, but at the same time, because Zhen Zhen is far from Beijing,

it's far from the political center, so to say, so Zhen Zhen was always also at the same time allowed to develop its own informal practice. So you see a kind of illicit experimentation happening in Zhen Zhen, a kind of formal culture and informal culture mix, so there's this constant dance between control and grassroots activity,

and that exists in Zhen Zhen until today. And this is the very reason I would argue why so many Western makers and hackers find it so intriguing, because it's this constant play and experimentation in between official and informal culture. Perfect answer.

Do I see another question? Yes, one there, one there. So we have three questions. Maybe we start with the first two questions in the first row over there, and then we get your question. Sure, great. So in the maker movement, there are platforms that makers use to share files,

share information, GitHub, Thingiverse. Can you comment at all on what the Shanghai, what are the mechanics of how the Shanghai community exchanges information? Sure, yeah, that's a great question. So the kinds of sharing practices that are central to Shanghai work through a, I would say, very informal network that comprises

a mix of both traditional forms of networking, so people going out for dinners, drinking, but also the usage of digital technologies. So there's a very well-known, I would argue by now well-known also in the West,

social media app called WeChat that really shapes interaction and also business culture in China these days. So WeChat is actually one of these platforms where people share, in many ways, similarly to how we would share in the West as well, when we collaborate with one another. So there's a lot of file sharing and knowledge sharing that happens both offline

in these sort of very informal gatherings, and as well as through the WeChat app. And then there's platforms like Taobao and Alibaba that support the kind of trade relationships that basically make Shanghai culture happen. So you can think of this as small-scale entrepreneurship that basically exists online

and which people informally connect as well. Is there a follow, I hear a follow-up question, yes. Yeah, so just that it's interesting that you say that because WeChat, if I understand correctly, is more of an exclusive platform, you have to be opted into that, right? So you'd have to be included, whereas anybody can log on to GitHub and Dell or something.

So is that the standard, you have to know someone to get into that? Yeah, so it basically goes through your social networks, you have to know somebody. There is other mechanisms in WeChat to broadcast, so there is some really interesting experimentation happening with sort of microblogging and writing that you can actually send out again but through your network,

but that proliferates very quickly. Okay, we're running a little bit out of time but I think we have time for the second question and the third question that I also promised. Okay, so the second question was, I think right next to you, right? No? He left. Okay, he left. I saw some hand back there. The next question is over there.

We got your microphone. Yeah, thank you very much for a very interesting talk. I once heard the former chief economist of the World Bank, Justin Lin, speak about Shenzhen and in his opinion, it had kind of grown beyond its own,

it succeeded so much that it was sort of going to, it couldn't carry on because the cost of real estate is so high and so on and in his talk, he was saying that he anticipates that a lot of the companies that are there are going to have to move out to new markets and so on and he thinks Africa might be a very good place for some of those companies to go. Could you comment on this and do you see this happening?

Yeah, so thank you for that question. So the question of how Shenzhen partners with Africa is a really interesting one. So you might have heard the Chinese government has a new policy called One Belt, One Road which is basically an expansion of the Silk Road that takes you all the way to Africa and in part, this is an expansion of infrastructural building, expanding China's capacity

to build roads and infrastructures and cities but while this is kind of top down, at the same time what I've seen emerge in Shenzhen over several years now are partnerships that happen more on the entrepreneurial level where for example, some people in manufacturing who have followed for many years are now partnering with people in Ethiopia to set up manufacturing sites there.

So this is happening really on the grassroots kind of level where individuals are struggling with some of the economic changes in China and are sort of seeking new markets and this is largely happening through partnerships between entrepreneurs. So these are not the kind of entrepreneurs that usually are the kind of Silicon Valley venture capitalist funded kind of ventures

but these are entrepreneurs who work through like getting loans from the bank and these kind of informal kind of entrepreneurship networks where people meet up for drinks and so on and that's now happening increasingly so interculturally and so I anticipate there will be way more happening sort of in these kinds of trans-regional networks

between Africa and the south of China. Sylvia, do we have time for one more question? Sure. Sure. Do we have more questions? More questions? More questions. Yes, over there. Great talk, thanks for that. You said that companies kind of openly share the designs for the devices.

Is there any legal framework for that or do they do that liberally? So as I said, these sharing practices are coming out of a really informal economy practices so there is in that sense no legal structure around that so I would say in many ways this unfolds through a kind of gray half legal,

some of it is legal but not all of it, a kind of gray zone of experimentation which allows actually a lot of this tinkering on a mass scale to happen. And so again, a lot of the people who are sort of committed to open source sharing and sort of rethinking the kind of legal structures that are in place that usually protect

the large corporations, they are drawn to that because they're saying okay, this is a kind of model that could perhaps also lead or provide insights for the kind of open sharing practices we do elsewhere. But yeah, there's no formalized structure on it which is exactly what allows it to happen basically.

One last question. The very last one. Yeah, in the first row, sorry. Right on here. It's hard to see, yeah. Thanks for your talk. It was very informative.

I would like your opinion about how do you, how do you view these developments in Shenzhen? Do you think the people that live there will ultimately benefit a lot? Because like right now we see these horrible working conditions and that. Do you think this maker movement

will change that to the better? So for that, we really have to see what has really happened in Shenzhen over the last 20 years. So I would say now there's a lot of attention towards Shenzhen as this kind of new place. But I think the biggest transformation has happened in Shenzhen really sort of in the 2000s. Especially when there was a lot of opportunity

in manufacturing, a lot of migrant workers and people really coming to Shenzhen to make themselves, to make a better living for themselves and for their families back home. And that has always, that was always sort of something that wasn't available for everyone, right? And there's a gendered aspect to that as well. You know, it was also very often available for,

you know, young men who try to remake themselves, right? So I think when we look at Shenzhen today, there's this really fascinating blend happening of a younger generation who grew up in Shenzhen. So there's now a first generation of Shengenders, right? Of people who really sort of identify with the city and there's a lot of wealth that grew over the years, you know, in that city.

So I think we will see the continuation of both happening. There will be more opportunities. There will be the continuous problem as much as it is in the West of who gets these opportunities, right? Like whose innovation is this in many ways, right? Who really has access to these structures? And so I think it will be a continuous kind of struggle, you know, especially for people, you know,

who aren't especially by the Chinese government considered, you know, these kinds of entrepreneurial citizens that they now want to, you know, really proliferate across the country. Thank you. Thank you. Your applause.