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