copycat design houses. Over the
years, these copycat productions
have adopted these open source
processes and moved beyond simply copying popular brands such as
Nokia or Apple. Today they often
produce new, consumer-specific
products, such as mobile phones
with additional features tailored to
particular customer segments or
location-specific demands. Examples
include dual-SIM-card mobile
phones that support two operator
networks on one device—such as
the G5 phone, a made-in-Shenzhen
brand for the Indian market—and
phones with built-in compasses
that are shipped to consumers in
the Middle East, who may need to
know the direction of Mecca during
prayers [ 11, 12]. Many of these innovations were later reappropriated by
mainstream mobile manufacturers;
for example, in 2010 Nokia launched
two dual-SIM mobile phones.
Copycat productions from
Shenzhen are often described with
the term shanzhai (山寨). However,
in the hackerspace community,
shanzhai now speaks to a new
form of innovation based on the
principle of open source manufacturing and continuous remaking.
The literal translation of shanzhai
is “mountain village” or “mountain
stronghold,” the home to bandits or Robin Hood–like figures
who oppose and evade corrupted
authority. China’s hackerspaces
invoke this image of subculture in
order to argue for an alternative
take on the meaning of copying
through the lens of remaking.
The examples of shanzhai phones
cited above are used to challenge
ideas of innovation promoted by
politicians and corporations. Since
China’s entry into the WTO in 2001,
a new line of reforms stresses the
need to transcend China’s reli-
ance on manufacturing. Through
redirecting social and economic
development toward the creation
of ideas, services, and knowledge,
China should evolve from the image
of “made in China” to “created in
China.” Drawing upon shanzhai
innovation, China’s hackerspaces
argue for an alternative version of
“created in China.” Rather than pro-
posing to overcome manufacturing
for the sake of knowledge produc-
tion, they offer a view that China’s
existing manufacturing infrastruc-
ture could be used to accomplish
in practice what so far has been a
political vision.
HAXLR8R uses China’s hackerspaces as local hubs to facilitate
this collaboration. During their
time in China, the invited start-ups are based out of hackerspaces,
where they brainstorm and build
prototypes. The staff of the hackerspaces facilitate connections with
local manufacturers to implement
the ideas. HAXLR8R merges maker
creativity with the open source
manufacturing of Shenzhen’s shanzhai factories. The idea is that both
sides benefit: Hardware manufacturers find new clients as mass-scale production demands from big
corporations decrease; at the same
time, small start-ups are able to
affordably produce and test their
products.
Nomiku, one of the projects
that took shape during the latest
HAXLR8R, illustrates this idea of
merging maker and shanzhai culture. Nomiku, depicted in Figure
2, is a Kickstarter project that
received crowd-sourced funding to
make an affordable and easy-to-use device for sous vide cooking—a
technique popular among high-end chefs that uses water, airtight
plastic bags, along with precise
• Figure 2. Nomiku
promotional photograph.
November + December 2012