day-to-day use) and what happens on the factory floor (the
site of manufacture, production, and wage labor). The
“human” in human-centered design, the “participant” in
participatory design, and the “maker” who advocates the
“democraticization” of production concentrates on the
designer-user/producer-consumer relationship, but rarely on
the relationship to the factory worker, producer, mechanical
engineer, and so on. This is particularly ironic considering
PD’s original concern to intervene in processes of
outsourcing, deskilling of labor, and the re-organization of
work [3, 6, 7]. The central argument of what follows is that
‘participation’ in the design process does not only include
the social context of the end user, but also, crucially, the
material, socio-economic and cultural context of
production. This paper demonstrates this by focusing on the
manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, China, as a crucial agent
in much of the design and creation of contemporary
technology.
“Making” is often celebrated as a method that might
revitalize industrial production in Western knowledge
economies, e.g. [1]. In reality, this is not a straight-forward
or easy process. Many hardware start-ups face difficulties
in transitioning from hobby to professional making and
manufacturing [16, 49]. A number of businesses have tried
to capitalize on these difficulties by providing makerentrepreneurs with an access to manufacturing in China.
Take, for instance, Highway1, a hardware incubator in San
Francisco, which promises start-ups a smooth transition into
mass manufacturing without having to spend substantial
amounts of time at their China-based manufacturing sites.
Here, engaging with manufacturing expertise is rendered a
problem space and an inconvenient hurdle for designers,
makers and start-ups. Implicit in this approach is a
widespread conception of technology production, which
splits manufacturing and design along geographical lines; in
which technology is conceived and designed in the West,
and then manufactured in low-wage regions with loose
regulatory environments. The evidence of this idea of
design is emblazoned on the iPhone: “Designed by Apple in
California. Assembled in China.” Designers, here, are
understood as the agents, with their ideas being executed
elsewhere. In its most extreme formulation this division
corresponds to a Cartesian inspired ‘mind-body dualism’ in
which an active rational mind in the West guides a passive,
inert body in the so-called developing world.
In this paper, we build on prior work that has begun
challenge simplistic binaries of design-production,
examining processes and cultures of design, making, and
repair in regions outside of the United States and Europe [3,
23, 25, 39]. Drawing from research with mobile repair
workers in rural Namibia, for example, Jackson et al. [25]
focus on mundane sites of repair, breakdown and reuse as
important, but often neglected sites of design. In engaging
with these often overlooked places, commonly thought of
as technologically, economically and socially “behind,”
scholars have argued for an approach that challenges
models of technological production in which design and
innovation are seen to emerge predominantly from global
epicenters in the West (e.g. Silicon Valley) [2, 3, 13, 23, 25,
38].
Our work builds upon this research, by taking seriously
manufacturing as site of expertise, design and creative
work. We draw from long-term ethnographic research with
factories, makers, and hardware start-ups in Shenzhen, a
global hub of electronic manufacturing located in Southern
China. In this paper, we analyze the social, technological,
and economic processes of manufacturing in Shenzhen,
rooted in a culture of tinkering and open source production
that has evolved in the shadows of global outsourcing and
large-scale contract manufacturing. We demonstrate that a
growing number of maker entrepreneurs have begun to
intersect with this manufacturing ecosystem, experimenting
with modes of design, production, and collaboration.
Examining these intensifying collaborations enables a
deeper and nuanced conceptualization of both design and of
the ongoing transformation of Shenzhen.
Shenzhen & the maker movement
In the last years, there has been a growing interest in the
potential impact of a so-called “maker” approach to
technological innovation, education, and economic growth
[29]. “Making” is thought to enable a move from tinkering
and play, to prototyping and entrepreneurship and, finally,
to help revive industries and sites of manufacturing lost due
to histories of outsourcing. Making is drawing investment
from governments, venture capitalists, and corporations
around the world. While the US government promotes
digital fabrication and making as a way to return to the
“made in America” brand (with the White House hosting its
own Maker Faire) [33, 36], the European Union has
introduced formal policies aimed at rebuilding
manufacturing capacities and know-how in order to sustain
their knowledge economies [15]. Large international
corporations have also started to invest. In 2013, Intel
introduced the Arduino compatible Galileo board; an “Intel
inside” microcontroller platform aimed at branding Intel as
a champion of the maker approach.
Our work challenges the dominant narratives of maker
culture by critically investigating the relationship between
making, designing, and manufacturing. We argue for a
return to one of the most fundamental concerns of PD, i.e.
to foreground the expertise, tacit and situated knowledge of
everyday work practice [43, 46]. Our focus is on the ways
in which the city of Shenzhen has emerged as a central
player in the broader imaginary as making shifts from
hobby to entrepreneurial practice. Shenzhen figures in the
global maker imaginary as a “maker’s dream city” or “the
Silicon Valley for hardware,” where visions of
technological futures get implemented today. Until recently,
few technology researchers and people in the broader IT
media sector have paid much attention to Shenzhen. This
began to change, when a growing number of “makers”
traveled to the coastal metropolis to turn their ideas into
end-consumer products. Well-known examples of these
made-in-China devices are the virtual reality goggles
Oculus Rift and the Pebble smart watch. In 2012, one of the
first hardware incubator programs, HAXLR8R (now
renamed as HAX), opened its offices in Shenzhen. Other
investment programs such as Highway1, Bolt, and Dragon
Innovation followed suit. Shenzhen draws not only makers
and hardware start-ups, but also large corporations such as
Intel, Texas Instruments, Huawei, and more. Intel, for
instance, has invested 100 million USD in what the
company calls the “China Technology Ecosystem” in
Shenzhen [22]. Since 2013, the MIT Media Lab has
organized tours for its students through Shenzhen’s
electronic markets and factories. In a recent blog post Joi
Ito, head of the Media Lab, records his impressions,
describing local factories as “willing and able to design and
try all kinds of new processes to produce things that have
never been manufactured before” [24].
How did Shenzhen, once known as a site of cheap and low
quality production, become the place to be for
contemporary hardware innovation? How have design
processes, such as those that Ito speaks of, developed and
fed into the culture of manufacturing that has emerged in
the city over the past three decades? Who is considered a
legitimate participant and what sites of expertise and design
are rendered invisible?
The findings presented in this paper challenge the common
binary of “made in China” versus “designed in California”
that inherently associates the West with creativity and
innovation and China with low quality production. We
argue that what we witness in Shenzhen today has an
important impact on the relationship between making,
manufacturing and design. This paper contributes by
shedding light on a situated practice of design, prototyping
and ideation that emerges from within manufacturing. The
paper, thus, provides new insights into histories and
cultures of professional design and making that have
emerged outside of more familiar IT hubs such as Silicon
Valley [41, 47]. Our aim is to foster an engagement with
mundane sites of contemporary industrial production – like
Shenzhen – in order to advance a critical inquiry of design,
maker production, global processes of technology work and
labor, and participation.
METHODS & APPROACH
We draw from long-term research about technology
production in China in order to examine the cultural and
technological processes that unfold at the intersection of
design and manufacturing. This includes in-depth
ethnographic research conducted over 5 years, hands-on
participation in maker and manufacturing projects, and the
hosting of a series of interdisciplinary workshops and
conferences that brought together scholars and practitioners
concerned with making and manufacturing. Ethnographic
research conducted by the first author included long-term
participant observation in five hackerspaces and at over
thirty maker-related events such as Maker Faires, Maker
Carnivals, Hackathons, Barcamps, and Arduino workshops
across the cities of Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen, as
well as several months of ethnographic fieldwork at a
hardware incubator in Shenzhen, following the day-to-day
workings of ten start-ups and their journeys of moving from
idea into production. Participant observation at
hackerspaces included joining daily affairs such as
prototyping, space management, member meet-ups, open
houses, and the organization of workshops. The research at
the hardware incubator included daily observations at the
office space as well as accompanying start-ups during
sourcing, prototyping, and manufacturing.
Between 2012 and 2014, we made numerous trips to
Shenzhen to focus on the history and culture of the region’s
local manufacturing industry. We hosted a series of handson workshops and intensive research trips in Shanghai and
Shenzhen (in total 5 over the duration of two years). These
events enabled us to bring together an interdisciplinary
network of 120 scholars, makers and industry partners from
China, the United States, South-East Asia, and Europe
concerned with “making.” Backgrounds of our participants
spanned the fields of HCI, the arts, design, engineering,
manufacturing, science fiction writing, and philosophy.
Throughout these events, we collated hundreds of hours of
video and audio material of interviews, field visits, panel
discussions, hands-on workshops and discussion sessions.
In total, we conducted over 150 formal interviews with
relevant stakeholders including makers, members and
founders of hacker and maker spaces, organizers of maker
related events, factory workers, owners, and managers,
government officials and policy makers, employees in
design firms and large IT corporations who were invested
in making and manufacturing, artists and urban planners,
entrepreneurs and investors. As common in ethnographic
research, we prepared sets of interview questions, which we
expanded and modified as we went along and identified
emergent themes and new questions. We combined
discourse analysis, situational analysis [11], and research
through design [5, 51]. Although we have interviewed
people from a wide range of backgrounds, for the purposes
of this paper, we draw on a subset of our interviews, which
were conducted with people active in Shenzhen’s
manufacturing industry as well as those from the global
maker scene who are intersecting with manufacturing. As
many of our interviewees are public figures, we refer them,
when they spoke in a public context (e.g. at workshops,
conferences, Maker Faires, etc.), by their real names. We
anonymized all informal conversations and interviewees
who preferred not to be named.
Our research team comes from a mixed background
including interaction design, HCI, cultural anthropology,
China studies, urban studies, philosophy, entrepreneurship,
and physical computing. This has proven to be effective in
allowing an in-depth engagement with both the
technological and social practices of making and
manufacturing. All of us speak Mandarin Chinese (one of
us is a native speaker and the other two have received
formal language training for more than 5 years). Interviews
were conducted in both English and Chinese. All formal
interviews were professionally translated and transcribed.
SHENZHEN: FROM OUTSOURCING TO SHANZHAI
Shenzhen is a young city; the build up of its urban
landscape dates back only 30 years ago, when a series of
village collectives began to be transformed into one of the
world’s largest manufacturing hubs, e.g. [14, 34]. This was
in part enabled by the implementation of a government
policy that declared Shenzhen a Special Economic Zone
(SEZ) [19, 30]. In 1979, when the SEZ policy went into
effect, Shenzhen had a population of under 50 000, by 2010
it had morphed into a metropolis of over 10 million people1.
The growth of Shenzhen coincided with, and was propelled
by, an outsourcing boom, which, to quote Lüthje et al.,
“emerged from the massive restructuring of the US
information technology industry that began in the 1980s”
[30]. Throughout this period, companies in the US and
Europe moved their manufacturing facilities into low-cost
regions of the so-called developing world. Shenzhen
constituted a particularly attractive site; as an SEZ the
barriers of entry for foreign corporations were significantly
lowered, with a range of incentives including tax
reductions, affordable rents and investments aimed at
integrating science and industry with trade. The outsourcing
of factories and manufacturing clusters radically reshaped
the high tech districts of the United States. As a result, by
the 1990s, with the rise of the “new economy,” the IT
industry was “no longer dominated by vertically integrated
giant corporations such as IBM but rather was shaped along
horizontal lines of specialized suppliers of key components
such as computer chips, software, hardware disk drives, and
graphic cards” [30].
With the gradual upgrade of technological and
organizational skills in former low-cost assembly locations,
a process of vertical re-integration began to take place. By
the late 1990s, Taiwanese ODMs (original design
manufacturing) such as Acer, HTC, Asus and Foxconn,
which designed the manufactured product on behalf of their
brand-name customers, started to develop substantial
intellectual property rights on their own [30]. One
particularly famous example is the ODM HTC that entered
the market with its own branded cell phone. This shift
began challenge the global leadership of established hightech economies.
1
We can’t do justice here to the complexity of Shenzhen’s history
and direct the reader to work by Mary Ann O’Donnell, Juan Du,
Winnie Wong, Josephine Ho, Carolyn Cartier, and others [9, 14,
19, 34, 35, 50].
As contract manufacturers grew in size, and began catering
predominantly to large brands, a network of entrepreneurs
saw an opportunity to establish themselves in the gaps of
the global economy. A dense web of manufacturing
businesses emerged in Shenzhen, catering towards less
well-known or no-name clients with smaller quantities, who
were not of interest to the larger players. This less formal
manufacturing ecosystem (known as shanzhai 山 寨 in
Chinese) is comprised of a horizontal web of component
producers, traders, design solution houses, vendors, and
assembly lines. They operate through an informal social
network and a culture of sharing that has much in common
with the global maker movement (though largely motivated
by necessity rather than countercultural ideals). We now
turn, in greater detail, to this local manufacturing culture.
Shanzhai 山寨
Shanzhai translates into English as mountain stronghold or
mountain fortress, and connotes an informal, outlaw
tradition. The term has been in use in China for a long time
and features most prominently in folk stories like the
Shuihuzhuan (water margins) that tells the adventures of
108 rebels, who hide in the mountains and fight the
establishment. Building on this common narrative, Jeffrey,
describes shanzhai as the story of “outlaws who have gone
away to the mountains, doing things within their own rules.
There's an element of criminality about shanzhai, just the
way that Robin Hood is a bit of an outlaw. But it's really
about autonomy, independence, and very progressive
survival techniques.“ [26].
Scholars speculate that the term was first applied to
manufacturing in the 1950s to describe small-scale familyrun factories in Hong Kong that produced cheap, low
quality household items, in order to “mark their position
outside the official economic order” [19]. They produced
counterfeit products of well-known retail brands such as
Gucci and Nike, and sold them in markets that would not
buy the expensive originals. As electronic manufacturing
migrated to Shenzhen the informal network of shanzhai
manufacturing found a perfect product in the mobile phone.
Shanzhai production includes not only copycat versions of
the latest iPhone, but also new creations and innovations of
phone design and functionality (see Figure 1).
Within China, shanzhai devices are catered towards lowincome migrant populations that could not afford more
expensive branded products. Shanzhai phones have a strong
global market, targeting low-income populations in India,
Africa, and Latin America [20, 48]. As the shanzhai
ecosystem matures, we are beginning to see the
development of branded phones. Xiaomi （小米），to
take but one example, is an affordable smart phone that
comes with a chic design and makes use of sophisticated
branding techniques. Although it grew by leveraging the
shanzhai industry, Xiaomi is rarely associated with it.
hardware hacking in the West is celebrated as enabler of
future innovation, the open manufacturing mechanism of
shanzhai is often denounced as holding China back on its
modernization path due to its lack of principles and norms
such as the international copyright law [19]. In the next
section we describe in greater detail the particularities of
shanzhai’s open production.
OPEN MANUFACTURING: GONGBAN & GONGMO
Figure 1. Examples of four shanzhai phones (from left to
right): phone shaped as apple, phones shaped after children's
toy and Chinese alcohol brand, phone that also functions as
flashlight and radio. Photos taken by authors, 2012-2014.
Rather it has become widely accepted as a national phone
brand that many Chinese are proud of.
While some people associate shanzhai with stealing and
low quality goods [48], there is a growing endorsement of
shanzhai as a prime example of Chinese grassroots
creativity that has innovated an open source approach to
manufacturing. One strong proponent is Bunnie Huang,
who gained widespread recognition when he hacked the
Xbox in 2003. In a series of blog posts, Huang details the
workings of shanzhai as a unique “innovation ecosystem
[that developed] with little Western influence, thanks to
political, language, and cultural isolation” [21]. Huang here
refers to a highly efficient manufacturing ecosystem that
rests on principles of open sharing that are different from,
but also compatible with, more familiar open sharing
cultures.
Shanzhai is neither straightforward counterculture nor prosystem. As a multi-billion USD industry, it is deeply
embedded in contemporary modes of capitalist production.
At the same time, with its roots in and ongoing practices of
piracy and open sharing, shanzhai challenges any inherent
link made between technological innovation and the tools,
instruments, and value systems of proprietary, corporate
research and development. As Jeffrey and Shaowen
Bardzell argue, analysis that upholds the strict boundaries
between critical design and affirmative design; resistance
culture and capitalist culture is often too simplistic [4].
Shanzhai producers are acutely aware of the global market
economy, and have developed incisive and canny strategies
to negotiate, subvert, criticize, ironize, and profit from it
[19]. The early and affordable shanzhai versions of the
smart phone, for instance, were designed for customer
segments that could not afford the expensive and branded
phones on the market. Shanzhai disrupted who gets to
decide over new markets, customers, and how tech business
was to be done. In other words, issues of concern in critical
and reflective design practice – such as “passivity,”
“reinforcing the status-quo,” “illusion of choice” [4] – are
as salient in shanzhai production as they are in conceptual
design. It is particularly ironic, then, that while open
During our research in Shenzhen, we met and interviewed
many different players in shanzhai production ranging from
component producers, vendors, traders, assembly, and
design solution houses. One consistent element that we
found to be at the core of shanzhai was the production of
so-called “public boards,” called gongban ( 公 版 ) in
Chinese; production-ready boards designed for endconsumer electronics as well as industry applications.
Gongban are typically produced in independent design
houses that link the component producers (e.g. a chip
manufacturer) and the factories that assemble the different
parts into phones, tablets, smart watches, medical devices,
and so on.
During our research, we followed closely the process of one
of the region’s largest distributers and their internal design
house that produces about 130 gongban per year. The
design house does not sell any of these reference boards,
but rather gives them out to potential customers for free,
alongside a list of components that go into making the
board as well as the design schematics. The company
makes money by selling the components that go into the
boards. As such, it is in their interest to support as many
companies as possible to come up with creative “skins” and
“shells” (called gongmo in Chinese) that are compatible
with their boards. Their customers, then, take a gongban of
their liking as is or build on top of it. The boards are
designed so that the same board can go into many different
casings: e.g. one board can make many different smart
watches or many differently designed mobile phones. Since
2010, years before Pebble Watch or the Apple Watch made
news, thirty some companies in Shenzhen were shipping
their own smart watches based on this open production
mechanism (see Figure 2).
The gongban public board functions like an advanced
version of an open source hardware platform such as the
Arduino, yet differs in that it constitutes a bridge into
manufacturing. “We call this shanzhai in Shenzhen. It’s a
mass production artwork,” explained Larry Ma
(anonymized), the head of the aforementioned distributor’s
design house. To Larry Ma, there is no question that
shanzhai is different from simple copycat. “First, shanzhai
needs creativity: it is something only a person with a quick
reaction who knows the industry chain very well can do.
and important decisions with regards to investment, release
dates, and collaboration partners are often made over
informal dinner meet-ups and weekend gatherings. These
social connections are central to getting business done in
Shenzhen, as we discuss in greater detail in the next section.
Many of our interlocutors saw themselves as belonging to a
grassroots community and maintained that it was the mutual
support of Shenzhen’s open manufacturing culture that
enabled their competitive advantage.
MAKING IT IN SHENZHEN
Figure 2. Gongban (public/open board) and Gongmo
(public/open casing) of a smart watch, Shenzhen, China. Photo
taken by authors, April 2014.
Shanzhai makers are asking themselves what the normal
people will need next… It is very important that you are
very familiar with the upstream and downstream industry
chain. And there is a kind of hunger. These three elements
together make it an art work… it’s about being hungry for
the future.”
Larry Ma’s R&D unit is one of many corporate entities in
the shanzhai ecosystem that have grown over the years into
substantial businesses. This growth has occurred outside the
traditional IP regime, using an open manufacturing
ecosystem rooted in open reference boards, and a culture in
which the bill of materials (a list of all the materials that
goes into making a particular device, something that a
company like Apple keeps strictly closed) is shared. This
open culture of production has enabled local chip
manufacturers such as Allwinner and Rockchip to compete
with renowned international corporations like Intel. At the
crux of this manufacturing process is their speed to market,
driven by what Larry Ma describes as “hunger.” In the
shanzhai ecosystem, ideation, prototyping and design
happen alongside the manufacturing process. Products are
designed in relation to the demands of a fast changing
market. Rather than spending months or years deliberating
over the next big hit, shanzhai builds on existing platforms
and processes, iterating in small steps. In this way, shanzhai
brings new products to the market with remarkable speed.
In Shenzhen, cellphones can go from conceptual designs to
production-ready in 29 days. Products are market-tested
directly by throwing small batches of several thousand
pieces of a given product into the market. If there is demand
and they sell quickly, more will be produced. There is a
commitment to never building from scratch (an approach
that is shared by the open source community). Prototyping
and consumer testing occur rapidly and alongside the
manufacturing iteration process, rather than occurring
beforehand (where it is commonly placed in Westerncentric design models).
A particular social dynamic is crucial to this design in
manufacturing process. Personal and business lives blend,
Shenzhen’s population comes from elsewhere. More than
95% of the city’s population is migrants. Shenzhen’s
technology sector grew from the intersection of two early
flows. The first were technological entrepreneurs from
Taiwan, involved in the early chip industry, who sought to
take advantage of China’s economic opening and it’s initial
experiments with SEZ’s. This stream of capital cross-fed
into a giant internal movement throughout the Mainland, in
which a vast ‘floating population’, freed from the controls
of the command economy, poured into the coastal cities
looking for work. This dynamic is still very much at work
today. In the summer of 2014, Foxconn was reported to be
recruiting 100 000 workers to build the iPhone 6.
It is not only the promise of a better income, but the hopes
for a different future that motivate hundreds of thousands of
migrant workers every year to seek employment in
Shenzhen, often far away from their home towns and
families, sending back remittances. Though, as is widely
reported, there is an issue of sweatshop labor in Shenzhen,
many of the people we met during our research promote
Shenzhen as full of opportunities, a dream city, a place
where “you can make it” in China today. Violet Su, for
instance, worked her way up from a part-time job to
personal assistant to Seeed Studio2’s CEO “Shenzhen is a
good place to live,” she says. “If you go to another city,
people treat you like outsiders. But here everyone belongs.
It’s like as if everyone was born here. When I first came to
Shenzhen I really liked one of the city’s slogan that
decorated the bus: ‘When you come to Shenzhen, you are a
local person.’”
Many who enter the shanzhai ecosystem do not come from
privileged socio-economic backgrounds. Take, for instance,
Ye Wang (anonymized), the manager of a shanzhai tablet
company. Wang is one of the few, who “made it.” His
company has revenue of several million USD a year,
shipping tablets to South America, Eastern Europe, Russia,
and the United States. Wang originally came to Shenzhen at
the urging of a relative who was working at the Chinese car
manufacturer BYD (Build Your Dream) and who helped
2
Seeed Studio is a Chinese hardware facilitator that sells open
hardware products and educational kits, and connects makers
driven to move from prototyping into production with Shenzhen’s
manufacturing ecosystem. www.seeedstudio.com
Wang to get a corporate scholarship that funded his college
education. After college, Wang entered what he calls “the
shanzhai community.” He made a name for himself by
leading a development team that produced one of the first
copycat versions of the Apple iPad. The localized, slightly
altered version of the tablet was introduced into the Chinese
market before Apple had officially released the iPad in the
United States. This did not go by unnoticed by bigger
players in the shanzhai ecosystem. Wang explained how,
once one has gained trust and made a name for themselves,
it is easy to find partners who are willing to freely share
resources: “Shenzhen is working just like this. You can
understand it as crowdfunding. It works differently from
crowdfunding via online social networking … you must be
firmly settled in the industry, be recognized, have a good
personality… Everybody in the industry chain gives you
things for free, all the materials, and only when you have
sold your product, you do the bills [and pay back].”
Wang, here, describes an important funding mechanism that
enables people who lack the financial resources to
nevertheless receive support from within the larger
shanzhai network. People become part of this social
network by participating in both informal face-to-face
gatherings (over dinner, lunch, at the manufacturing site)
and networking via mobile social media platforms such as
Wechat (www.wechat.cn). Much of the offline activity
takes place over alcohol-infused meals, KTV bars and
massage parlors, establishments that are frequented by a
largely male clientele, (all of which speaks to a strong
gender hierarchy that infuses shanzhai culture). People in
shanzhai think of themselves as driven and hard working,
committed to improving their standard of living and to
make money. Many considered the level of entrepreneurial
possibilities unique to Shenzhen: “there is no other place
like this in China. Here you find a lot of opportunities, you
can become yourself, you can realize your dream, you can
make a story out of your life.”
drawn to the city’s abundance of materials and the
production processes located here. For many of these
newcomers the first stop in Shenzhen are the markets of
Huaqiangbei (华强北), a 15-by-15-city block area, filled
with large department store buildings. Each mall contains a
labyrinth of stalls spread over several floors (see Figure 3).
Malls specialize in everything from basic components such
as LEDs, resistors, buttons, capacitors, wires, and boards to
products such as laptops, phones, security cameras, etc. For
makers, the markets provide immediate access to tools,
components and expertise. Ian Lesnet from Dangerous
Prototypes, a company that sells open hardware kits,
describes the lure of Huaqiangbei and Shenzhen as a whole:
“The wonderful thing about Shenzhen is that we have both
horizontal and vertical integration. In Huaqiangbei, you can
buy components. Go a little bit further out, people sell
circuit boards. A little bit further out, there are people who
manufacture things and attach components to circuit boards.
So you can actually have something built. And a little
further out there are people who make product cases. A
little further out you have garages with large-format printers
who make labels for your products and a little further out
they recycle it back down again. So you can build
something, design it entirely, have it manufactured, sell it,
and then break it down its components and recycle it back
into the center of the markets. You have all the skills and all
the people who can do that and they are all here in one
place. And that’s what’s really enticing about Shenzhen.”
“Living in Shenzhen is like living in a city-size techshop,”
echoes Zach Smith, one of the co-founders of the 3D printer
Makerbot. Smith first came to Shenzhen when Makerbot
started to collaborate with a local manufacturing business.
Since then he has spent many years working and living in
the city and has learnt to adapt to what he calls Shenzhen’s
“native design language.” “If you come to Shenzhen, you
are going to take your American design language and you
Shanzhai production is fast and nimble mostly due to this
unique social fabric through which decisions about new
products, design and pricing are made collaboratively. This
process entails people to be “on 24/7.” Every personal
interaction, no matter if offline or online, is also about
furthering a collective goal: the expansion and spread of
business opportunities, the discovery of niche markets and
the distillation of new mechanisms that will generate
additional sales. In this way shanzhai production culture is
not dissimilar from Silicon Valley, with its male dominated
management and entrepreneurial leadership, hard-driven
work ethic and peer pressure, all of which forms a closeknit community of informal socializing and information
sharing [41].
MAKERS IN SHENZHEN
In the last few years, Shenzhen has begun to draw yet
another wave of migrants – mobile elites such as tech
entrepreneurs, hackers, makers, geeks and artists, who are
Figure 3. Huaqiangbei markets (upper left to bottom right):
USB sticks shaped as plastic figurines, stacks of wires,
assortment of magnets, department store building view from
the top.
are going to have to translate it,” Smith explains. “If you
are out here you can start to learn that local design
language, and start using it in your own designs… It helps
you make designs that are easier to manufacture, because
you are not substituting a bunch of stuff… People out here
can build their designs in this native way. As you go and
meet with manufacturers you understand their design
process, how they want to build things, or what they are
capable of building. This changes the way you want to do
your design, because as a designer, if you are a good
designer, you are going to try and adapt to the techniques
instead of making the techniques adapt to you.”
What Smith describes here was something many of the
makers we interviewed experienced; transforming their
designs through interactions with factories, engineering
processes, machines and materials. Manufacturers and
makers work together to prototype, test materials and
functionality, continuously altering everything from the
shapes of product casings to PCB design (Printed Circuit
Board). Together, they iterate and shape the design of the
final product through a process that typically spans several
months of frequent often-weekly meetings. Take, for
instance, maker entrepreneur Amanda Williams, one of the
few women active in the scene. She has been working
closely with several different manufacturing units in
Shenzhen during the process of designing an interactive
lamp. Williams reflects on these collaborations as follows:
“sometimes you find out from a factory that this won't work
or that won't work, or you can't use this size because you
need a certain amount of wall thickness or this material's
gonna break… working with the factories, we understand
how to modify our design, in order to make it better for
mass manufacturing.”
Makers working in Shenzhen are brought closer to the
tactility that lies at the heart of hardware design. In molding
their visions whilst enmeshed – rather than removed from –
the context of manufacturing, their designs become tuned to
the materiality of the hardware, modulating their visions
Figure 4. in Huaqiangbei: makers getting a "feel" for
different components. Photos by first author, 2013.
through bodily reactions to the size of a button or the feel of
a knob, as Ian Lesnet elaborates: “When you design
electronics, it's not just an engineering problem. It's a
design process. Being able to just walk into Huaqiangbei,
touch buttons, push them, be like, ‘Oh, this one is weak.
This one is strong.’ Choosing things. Holding things. Get
this amount of knowledge that you don't get sitting at a
computer sitting somewhere else in the world” (see Figure
4). Many agreed that this tacit and embedded learning had
become central to their design process and was something
they learned only after they had arrived in Shenzhen. “In
school, they don't teach you DFM, design for
manufacturing, at all,” says Antonio Belmontes from Helios
Bikes, “the factory helps us bring our ideas down to design
for manufacturing. They also help you save money.
Especially when you approach them during the design
process.”
What draws tech entrepreneurs, makers and designers to
Shenzhen is that phases of ideation, design, market testing,
and industrial production evolve together in an iterative
process (as opposed to design practices in which ideation
and prototyping are thought of as phases that proceed and
then guide processes of execution). What emerges is a
tactile and deeply embodied design practice that requires
close connections with both materials and the local skillsets
that many describe as a highly professionalized form of
making in action. John Seely Brown, former director of
Xerox Park, during a visit to Shenzhen, reflected upon this
process by speaking of tacit versus explicit knowledge.
“What you are really doing,” he said speaking of hardware
production in Shenzhen, “is modulating a conversation
between your tools and the materials your are working on
for some end result. And you are overseeing that dance in
its own right.”
SEEED STUDIO & THE 2014 SHENZHEN MAKER FAIRE
Much of what we see with regards to maker
entrepreneurialism in Shenzhen today goes back to the early
efforts of Seeed Studio, a Chinese hardware facilitator that
connects Shenzhen’s world of manufacturing with the
global maker scene. Seeed Studio was founded in 2008 by
the then 26-year old Eric Pan（潘浩）and grew quickly
from a two-people start-up into a successful business that
now has more than 10 Million USD annual revenue and
over 200 employees. Seeed Studio sells hardware kits,
microcontroller platforms, and custom-made printed circuit
boards to makers. It also provides highly personalized
services. One of Seeed Studio’s core businesses is to enable
maker start-ups to move from an idea to mass production by
identifying what Eric Pan calls “pain points”—moments of
transition, where a company lacks the knowledge of how to
scale up. Seeed Studio products have gained reputation
worldwide. They are offered for purchase online, on makerspecific platforms, and in mainstream retailers in the US.
When HAXLR8R opened its doors as one of the first
hardware incubator programs in Shenzhen in 2012 it was
with the help and in the offices of Seeed Studio.
moving from making one thing to making hundreds of
thousands or millions of things. While Dougherty
emphasized processes of tinkering and play, Tong and Lin
focused on the role of design in the professionalized
manufacturing process, or as Lin put it: “the process of
making just one thing is very different from continuous
production. It requires cross-disciplinary work. Hardware
is different from the Internet. You need to think about
design from the beginning. Design is central to all steps of
the process of manufacturing including differentiation,
customization, standardization… You also need to design
for future manufacturing, for the next assembly you need to
think about this from the beginning of the design process.”
Figure 5. "Innovate with China," product label by Seeed
Studio.
Eric Pan has become an influential voice of China’s maker
scene eager to demonstrate that “made in China” can mean
something more than just copycats and cheap labor. The
first thing one reads, when entering the offices of Seeed
Studio, is the tagline “innovate with China,” painted on a
large mural wall. A pun on the “made in China” brand, it is
also the label that adorns Seeed Studio products (see Figure
5). “When I came to the US in 2010, people there knew us
and liked our products, but nobody wanted to believe that
we are a Chinese company,” Pan recalls, “nobody had
thought that cool and innovative products could come of
China. That’s why, ever since, we have been using
‘innovate with China’ on our product labels to demonstrate
that manufacturing in China can mean ‘partnership’ and
innovation instead of cheap labor and low quality.”
“Innovate with China” was also the slogan of China’s first
featured Maker Faire that took place in April 2014,
organized and hosted by Seeed Studio. The Maker Faire
constituted an opportune moment for Seeed Studio to
demonstrate its vision of China’s creative role in the world
of making and manufacturing. People who attended the
Maker Faire were well-known figures in the maker
community, and included amongst others Dale Dougherty,
founder of MAKE magazine, Chris Anderson, who
authored the book Makers, Tom Igoe who co-founded
Arduino, Jay Melican who carries the informal title “Intel’s
Maker Czar,” Eri Gentry from BioCurious, Vincent Tong
and Jack Lin from Foxconn.
The talks and presentations at the Shenzhen Maker Faire
were wrapped between two keynote speeches: Dale
Dougherty, considered by many to be the founding father of
the US maker movement, gave the opening speech, while
Vincent Tong and Jack Lin (林 志 聪 ) from Foxconn, gave
the closing plenary. Dougherty, in his talk, focused on the
creativity that lies in making one thing. He emphasized the
culture of hobbyist creation and tinkering that went into the
early stages of development of the first Apple computer,
and described making as an adventure where the outcomes
are uncertain. Tong and Lin, on the other hand, talked about
the opportunities and challenges that lie in scaling up,
The Shenzhen Maker Faire was Dougherty’s first visit to
China. When we interviewed Dougherty during his visit, he
reflected on the differences of making in the US and in
China. “It’s an indeterminate problem of ‘how do I get this
made?” he said speaking of the difficulties many hobbyist
and professional makers face in the US, “where should I go
to find the parts?” Makerspaces address part of the issue,
he further elaborated, but scaling up was almost impossible:
“They don't necessarily have the context, skill sets or
knowledge to make. Even, "What are the right things to
make or not make at all?" Part of it is that American
manufacturing is geared to large companies, and so those
interfaces aren't there for a small company.” Dougherty,
here, counters the overly euphoric narratives that view
making as enabling an easy return to the “made in
America” brand. “I see this as an information problem,” he
says “you might find out while being here that if you
manufacture it this way, you should have designed it
differently.’”
In Shenzhen, design on the factory floor is not unique to
shanzhai, as those involved in the process know well. For
instance, what transpired from a couple of visits to a big
contract manufacturer (anonymized), even companies like
Apple have their designers and engineers (just like maker
entrepreneurs) work side by side with the designers and
engineers at the factory, iterating together until the very last
minute, when the product is frozen for release. This is in
contrast to a common perception of Apple as the creator
who outsources to the cheap labor provided by the
manufacturer.
DISCUSSION
“Apple computers are this really big example. Designed in
California, made in Shenzhen. We pride ourselves on
design and we don't have to do that other work. Remember
the paperless office. Things would just be designed on
computers and then made. It was almost like we didn't need
that dirty world near us. It could be in China… But physical
things have properties that speak to us intuitively that we
cannot just analyze on a computer screen, no matter how
much resolution we have. That's calling into question that
split between designed here and made there. “
(Dale Dougherty, Interview with the
authors, April 2014)
This paper sets out to question a prevailing myth of
technological production in which design is separated from
what Dougherty, here, calls the “dirty world” of
manufacturing. It does so by focusing on the culture of
open production and design that has developed in Shenzhen
over the last 30 years. More specifically, our research has
concentrated on how the ecosystem of shanzhai emerged
alongside the more-well known processes of outsourcing
and governmental policy that opened up the region to
foreign investment.
In doing so, our work challenges some of the prevalent
discourses and practice around making and its engagement,
however implicit, with participatory design. Central to the
early efforts of participatory design, and critical scholarship
of computing more broadly, has been an emphasis on the
user and a desire to empower those who might have less say
in technological production. Prominent figures of the maker
movement have turned this call for individual
empowerment into a powerful business strategy, e.g. [1].
Many maker kits and smart devices are marketed as
educational in that they train their consumers to become
producers themselves. Today, many users of digital
fabrication tools and open hardware platforms are indeed
producing a wide and rich variety of software code,
electronic schematics, 3D designs, and so on. Committed to
the culture and spirit of open source, many of these users
also freely share their design contributions. Maker products,
in this sense, function much like social media apps such as
Facebook or virtual worlds like Second Life, in which the
value of the product is significantly shaped by what people
“make” with it [8]. While this certainly broadens the range
and number of “participants” in the design of technology it
is also subject to a growing critique of the “sharing
economy,” in which, “the labor of users, fans, and
audiences is being put to work by firms” [45].
Moreover, digital fabrication tools such as the 3D printer or
the CNC milling machine, which are envisioned to enable a
broader audience to engage with processes of making, often
keep the designer at arm’s length from the kind of tacit
knowledge necessarily involved in the manufacturingcentered design process we have described in this paper.
While digital fabrication tools provide techniques for rapid
prototyping in a design studio, they do not engage one with
the situated and embodied processes of manufacturing on a
large scale. What becomes increasingly clear from our
engagement with Shenzhen is that, to repeat Dougherty’s
point stated above, “physical things have properties that
speak to us intuitively that we cannot just analyze on a
computer screen, no matter how much resolution we have.”
Thus, whilst the promotion of a return to hands-on making
is pervasive (“everyone is a maker”), many of the software
applications aimed at bringing designers into the production
of hardware have been oriented around creating an abstract
representation of production [17]. This separates the
designer and maker from the embedded and embodied
practice of production and the tacit knowledge that is
essential to cultures of production documented here. Our
aim is to challenge a mythic structure of technology
innovation in which the “creative” work of design is
highlighted, while the work of manufacturing remains at
arms length. In short, we follow Bannon and Ehn in
arguing, alongside the tradition of design anthropology, that
the insights “from an understanding of material culture” be
“more directly fed on to the practices of participatory
design” [3]. A rigorous participatory design practice not
only includes a deep engagement with the social context of
users, but also with the material and social conditions of
contemporary production.
Maker entrepreneurs who come to Shenzhen to turn visions
of smart and networked devices into products are
intersecting with these embedded and tactile processes of
production. Indeed, it is the close proximity to the processes
and materials of production that makes the city so enticing
to makers. As we have shown in this paper, it is not just
access to tools and machines, but a particular process of
design that draws makers into Shenzhen; prototyping is part
and parcel of fabrication, rather than preceding it; and
testing and designing evolves through daily interactions
with the workings of machines, materials, components, and
tools. From the electronic markets and craftsman
workshops to assembly lines and design solution houses,
Shenzhen immerses technology designers in a mode of
prototyping that is tied to the feel and touch of materials as
well as the concrete processes of manufacturing. Many of
the people we interviewed agreed that “being in it” was
crucial to learning, understanding, and working with what
they considered to be an open, informal and highly
professionalized design practice.
The goal of this paper has been to critically unpack
contemporary maker discourse by examining the remake of
Shenzhen. In so doing, we question the imaginary of
Shenzhen as the “Silicon Valley for Hardware,” that has
been fueled by promotional campaigns of hardware
incubators and corporate investment in the region. These
often linear stories of progress, which assume that
Shenzhen is “catching up” with innovation centers like
Silicon Valley, tend to be void of the intricacies of the
region’s production processes described in this paper; from
its history of outsourcing and piracy to the global scale of
contemporary shanzhai production. We have shown that
innovation, design and production are necessarily situated,
evolving in close relation to particular histories of
technological, economic and social development. In this,
the paper follows the call to locate design [9, 23, 25, 46] so
as to include the site of industrial production itself. Efforts
in critical computing have long called upon researchers and
designers to reflect upon “the values, attitudes, and ways of
looking at the world that we are unconsciously building into
our technologies” as well as the “values, practices and
experiences that are unconsciously, but systematically left
out” [42].
Clearly this extends well beyond the common user-designer
relationship. What values, norms and attitudes towards
manufacturing and production do we consciously or
unconsciously build not just into our designs, but also into
our critical theories and practices? What new possibilities
are opened up if we take seriously diverse and distributed
cultures of production? Who is considered a legitimate
participant in the “maker” revamp of industrial production?
What expertise and work is rendered invisible as makers
turn visions of networked objects into mass-produced
artifacts? These questions recall the central concerns of
early theorists of participatory design: a deep engagement
with sites of production, labor, and manufacturing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank everyone who contributed to this
research, particularly those at Seeed Studio, Chaihuo 柴火,
DFRobot, and XinCheJian 新 车 间 , as well as all the
makers, entrepreneurs, and shanzhai producers, who shared
with us their time and insights. This research was in part
funded by the National Science Foundation (under award
#1321065), the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese
Studies, and the Intel Science and Technology Center for
Social Computing.
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