Maker Faire Shenzhen: A Seminal Event for Makers in China

Regardless of the predicaments China faces, they are making good progress in innovation, encompassing design, manufacturing, entrepreneurship, and trade.  Of course, there is a global capital flow embedded in this.  The global capital structure aside, Korea has to take advantage of an open approach for innovation and new business creation as well.  I'm planning on attending Maker Faire in China next year.

From Makezine:

Maker Faire Shenzhen, held the first weekend of April 2014, celebrated the emergence of the maker movement in China and recognized the significance of Shenzhen as a global capital for makers. In recent years, Shenzhen has attracted makers from around the world who arrive like apprentices eager to learn about manufacturing and tap into the vast resources of the Shenzhen ecosystem.

Maker Faire Shenzhen was the first full-scale Maker Faire in China. An estimated 30,000 people walked the tree-lined streets to interact with makers, participate in workshops and listen to presentations. Maker Faire Shenzhen was a showcase for 300 makers who manned 120 exhibits. Organized by Eric Pan and his team at Seeed Studio, Maker Faire Shenzhen was a public demonstration of the robust productivity of China’s makers. The maker movement could play a major role in China in transforming both China’s view of itself and the world’s view of China as a center of innovation.  As a founder of Maker Faire, I was proud to see Maker Faire Shenzhen myself, participate as a speaker and learn what making means to others in China.

Maker Faire Shenzhen had its assortment of 3D printers, electronics, vehicles, games and robots, much like what you’d see at any Maker Faire.   Many commented that the makers were more commercial — from the start, they saw themselves as creating a product that could be sold.  Eric Pan said that he thought that more creative makers and individual projects that weren’t done for commercial reasons would come later on, as the movement matured out in China. If so, it might develop in opposite fashion from the US where the creative pursuits of hobbyist have over time developed into new business opportunities.

There were plenty of activities as well as student projects. I had two favorite student projects. One was a group of university students who had built a telepresence robot called Frank.  One of the team members said that they were showing the fifth generation of Frank. The Dexta Robotics team from Nanjing showed a project that is temporarily called Handuino, which is an apparatus for your hand that allows you to control a robotic hand. The founder of the company, Aler Gu, garduated from high school last year and has taken a year off to work on this project before heading to Cambridge University in the fall to study Mechanical Engineering. Aler sees possible industrial uses for a remotely controlled hand as well as a new interface for games. They are preparing an injection-molded version of the hand soon, and then will launch a Kickstarter.

One important takeaway I had from Maker Faire Shenzhen has to do with Kickstarter. Consider this.

If you launch a product on Kickstarter, there’s a good chance that before your Kickstarter closes, someone in China will have taken your design, modified it for manufacturing and produced a version of your thing, something that will take you nearly a year or more to produce after you’ve been funded.

Now, one might think that it is just about copying or cloning. Rather, it is because the resources for making anything are so widely available in China, and the expertise is so broad, they are hungry for new ideas and they can turn them into products faster than anywhere. It is speed combined with efficiency that drives innovation in China. What happens when China’s makers start adding the kind of creativity and design that is valued in the West as a competitive advantage?

Shenzhen also has its own mindset called “shanzhai,” which several speakers addressed in presentations.  Silvia Lindtner, an Austrian at UC Irvine and a co-founder of a Shanghai-base research group called HackedMatter, has been studying shanzai and sees it as a parallel development to the maker movement in China. Sylvia elaborated on shanzai in an email message.

Shanzhai is rooted in a highly distributed social network of factories, vendors, component producers, component traders, and design houses that share an approach to open sharing in many ways compatible with the global maker movement. David Li describes this as open source with Chinese characteristics; an open approach to manufacturing motivated by necessity rather than countercultural ideas. For instance, in the shanzhai ecosystem people work with open reference boards (gongban in chinese), open BOM (bill of materials) as well as open designs of form factors. This open process in manufacturing has allowed Chinese companies like Allwinner and Rockchip to innovate fast and become leaders in the non-ipad tablet market, competing with international corporations like Intel. Chinese makers and open hardware startups like Tom Cubie from Radxa are designing technologies that bridge these two spaces of open source, the shanzhai open manufacturing ecosystem and the global maker movement, enabling makers to design new products with more powerful hardware.

The biggest news for Maker Faire Shenzhen is that Foxconn sponsored the event, along with PCH International and Huaqiang, which operates the largest factory inside the city limits of Shenzhen. The Executive Chairman of Foxconn, Vincent Wang, spoke at Maker Faire.   He said that his company wanted to be involved in the event and listen to makers and learn from them. His colleague, Jack Lin, said that in the past Foxconn would not work with makers but five months ago, they have opened a new business unit to focus on makers. They have also created a new fabrication facility in Beijing that can be used to prototype new products.

Companies like Intel have a significant presence in Shenzhen. Randolph Wang of Intel Labs China is developing a new product called Edison, which is a computer the size of an SD card.  “Edison offers a unique combination, ” said Wang. “It is small and powerful.” Edison has the potential to be an important new platform for makers.  Wang said that it can be used both for prototyping and for the final product. Wang showed a number of sample applications developed within Intel Labs China, such as a paper notebook that was powered by Edison. A demo showed a person writing a message on paper that was interpreted as an email and sent by Edison. The demo showed how a freehand drawing could be captured as image and text. Edison is not yet available but we will be watching its development closely.

http://makezine.com/2014/04/16/maker-faire-shenzhen-a-seminal-event-for-makers-in-china/