A fishing village-turned city of some 22 million mostly migrants, Shenzen is a longtime center for manufacturing and now the darling of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who see Shenzhen's agility with hardware to be a perfect complement to the Silicon Valley software and ideas factory. Innovation is still possible, in such an environment there’s just a higher degree of difficulty to achieve it, given that China’s would-be innovators don’t have access to the same ideas, debates and habits of critical and creative thinking that their counterparts in other countries might have.īut there’s an old saying in China - "the sky is high, and the emperor is far away." And the city of Shenzhen is 1,300 miles away from the halls of power in Beijing. It started about five years ago, when a Taiwanese former PhD student-turned startup entrepreneur, David Li, moved from California to Shanghai - and set up China’s first MakerSpace. Another MakerSpace opened up in Shenzhen, just opposite Hong Kong, and now there are hundreds in China.Ĭhina’s leaders have embraced the Maker Movement, offering welcome resources and publicity, but also a less welcome reflexive desire to take MakerSpaces, which are meant to be open and inviting, without too many rules and expectations, and add structure and, well, expectations.Īnd this is happening at a time when China’s tech-savvy, relatively worldly, younger generation has, under Xi Jinping’s rule, seen open spaces for creative expression and challenges to Communist Party-approved ways of thinking close up, online, in classrooms and in the media. More websites have been blocked online, more Western textbooks banned. Into this environment in China comes the Maker Movement. The private sector is more nimble, but also cut-throat competitive, and often looking for the fastest way to a profit, which is usually to copy and recombine, rather than play around and come up with something startlingly new. It’s not that the potential isn’t there - it’s that, in many cases, the environment doesn’t support thinking that challenges the established way of doing things, or of open-ended research, failing, and trying again, and failing again, maybe for years, before hitting that eureka moment. But so far, they’ve done better on quantity than on quality. They’ve incentivized researchers to come up with patents and journal articles - and they have. They’ve invested hundreds of billions of dollars in science parks, research labs, and other initiatives. That hasn’t been the approach thus far, in trying to increase innovation in China.Ĭhina’s leaders have had a goal for almost two decades now, to make China a global power, ideally a global leader, in innovation. "It's really cool to meet new people, the whole society of makers, and get new ideas," he says. "It's a really cool place." Tumer says the real value to him of being at the Maker Faire was meeting other makers, and seeing what they're doing. now, when I'm bored, I just experiment with making things with it." He now has his own company, TNA Designs. Tumer said he's considered himself a maker "ever since I got a 3D printer a couple of years ago. "This is a problem that most designers face, because there isn’t a tool for it," he says. "So for the radius of what they put on their designs, they just put a random number, but this is a really easy tool to use, so you just use it and write it down." All this for $5 at the Maker Faire. Tuna Tumer, 14, from Ankara, Turkey traveled to California with his dad for this year's SIlicon Valley Maker Faire, to learn from other makers and to show off his latest invention, a business card-sized metal card with scalloped edges, that can measure the radius of corners. ![]() And there's been international cross-pollination among Makers. More than 1.2 million people went to a Maker Faire last year alone in places like France, Italy, Turkey, Egpyt and China. ![]() ![]() There are some 180 annual Maker Faires - annual gatherings of Makers. There’s Make Magazine, online Maker communities. There are now thousands of MakerSpaces in dozens of countries around the world. So, first came MakerSpaces - kind of like communal use work benches or shop, with tools and materials and space for makers of all sorts to gather and share ideas. It started small, and went big - went global.
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