In China, Lessons of a “Hackerspace”

Emily Parker

1 Several years ago, Peng Ziyun was at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, studying music and technology. She learned about sound engineering and wanted to build something of her own. But she didn’t know how, and she didn’t have anyone to teach her. An Internet search led her to Xinchejian, China’s first formal “hackerspace,” a community-run workshop where ordinary people tinker with everything from art projects to robots. 

2 Ms. Peng, now 23, wanted to make a tree that could talk. With the encouragement of others at Xinchejian, she learned to drill and solder and to work with Arduino, an open-source microcontroller board that is user-friendly. Her new skills helped her to attach sensors and colored lights to an actual tree so that it would react to human touch. The tree spoke both English and Chinese: The more you interacted with it, the more it talked, its sound growing richer and its lights flashing vividly. 

3 Ms. Peng’s work, a meditation on the relationship between nature and man, was later shown in an art gallery and spent a month on display in a mall. “It definitely changed me,” Ms. Peng says of the experience. “It’s given me the confidence to build things like that in the future.” 

4 Already booming in the U.S., the maker movement (or DIY, for “do it yourself”) is now gaining ground in China, challenging assumptions about the country’s capacity for innovation. Make magazine co-founder Dale Dougherty defines a maker as someone who builds, creates or hacks physical materials, whether food, clothing or gadgets. Makers often gather at hackerspaces, or makerspaces, real-world locations where they can learn and work together. There are hundreds of hackerspaces world-wide and over a dozen now in China. 

5 Lone inventors have long tinkered in garages. But today, inventors can use software to design objects to be produced by desktop machines like 3-D printers. And thanks to the Internet, DIY is thoroughly collaborative. Rather than work on projects in secret, people freely share their ideas and designs online. Chris Anderson, former editor in chief of Wired, describes makers as “the Web generation creating physical things rather than just pixels on screens.” 

6 Xinchejian, founded in 2010, means “new workshop.” It occupies a rented room in a Shanghai warehouse. Members pay around $16 a month to use the space and tools, and on Wednesday nights it is open to the public. The Taiwanborn David Li, a 40-year-old programmer and a co-founder of Xinchejian, wants to lower the barriers for experimentation and play. “It’s not about getting together a group of geeks doing something. It’s a conduit for people to say, ‘This interactive stuff is not that scary, not that difficult.’” 

7 One of these tinkerers might develop the next groundbreaking technology, or at least that is the hope of Chinese policy makers. “Chinese industry has to change. It has to migrate to the next stage. Right now it’s purely contract-based. We execute what other people design,” says Benjamin Koo, an associate professor of industrial engineering at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Others wonder why China doesn’t have more internationally celebrated brands or a homegrown innovator like Steve Jobs. 

8 The Chinese government has taken an interest in the maker movement. Not long after Xinchejian opened its doors, Shanghai officials announced a plan to build 100 government-supported innovation houses. Last November, according to Mr. Li, the Communist Youth League of Shanghai helped to attract over 50,000 visitors to a Maker Carnival, where makers exhibited their creations to the public. 

9 In the city of Shenzhen, Seeed Studio works with global makers to transform their hardware designs into prototypes and samples. Seeed specializes in the small-scale manufacturing of experimental, niche-market products. The Sichuan-born Seeed Studio founder Pan Hao, also known as Eric Pan, doesn’t aim to replace big manufacturing but to complement it. “When designs go big, the traditional manufacturer will have new products to make,” Mr. Pan told me. “We are providing more candidates.” 

10 Seeed Studio may be a business, but it still sees itself as a frontier in China’s maker revolution. Its recruitment poster for new employees features a picture of the South American revolutionary Che Guevara, his head sprouting electronic components instead of hair. The poster calls for people to come together to “challenge the hegemony of industrialized mass production in an unprecedented way!” 

11 Some observers see China’s maker movement as yet another instance of the country’s tendency to produce shanzhai, or copycat goods. But Mr. Pan advises patience. “China is just on the way,” he said. “The first time you learn to write, you cannot write novels. You have to copy from the textbook to learn to write A, B, C, D.” 

12 For now, hackerspaces give Chinese inventors a community. Ms. Peng, the maker of the interactive tree, says that her life changed when she went to Xinchejian and realized there are “people out there that are sort of like me, they just want to build things, and learn.” 

中国创客空间的经验

埃米莉·帕克

1几年前，彭紫云（音译）在上海音乐学院学习音乐和技术。她学习了音响工程学，想自己搞点什么东西出来。但是不知道怎么做，也没人教她。在网上搜索一番之后，她找到了新车间，中国第一家正式的“创客空间”。这是一家由社区运营的工场，在那里普通人可以摆弄各种东西，从艺术作品到机器人。

2现年23岁的彭女士想要造一棵会说话的树。在新车间其他人的鼓励下，她学习打眼、焊接，以及使用方便易用的开放源码单片机阿都伊诺。掌握了新技术，她就能把传感器和彩色灯泡装在一棵真的树上，这样树会对人的触摸做出反应。这棵树能讲中英文：你和它互动越多，它讲得越多，声音越来越丰润，灯光熠熠生辉。

3彭女士的作品是对人和大自然关系的一种思考，后来在一家艺术画廊内展出，并在一家购物中心内展出了一个月。“它的确改变了我，”彭女士提及这段经历时说。“它给了我将来创作同类作品的信心。”

4创客运动（或者叫DIY，即“自己动手”）在美国早已蓬勃发展，在中国正日渐风行，并对那些有关中国创新能力的种种主观臆断提出了挑战。《制作》杂志的创始人之一戴尔·多尔蒂将创客定义为：建造、创造或者捣鼓有形材料的人，无论是食品、衣服还是小器具。创客们经常聚集在创客空间，或者叫制造者空间，这些是现实世界中真实的空间，他们在那里学习、合作。全世界有数百个创客空间，在中国现在有十几家。

5单干的发明家们长期以来一直在车库里捣鼓。但是如今，发明家们能够使用软件来设计可由诸如3D打印机之类的桌面设备制造的产品。而且，由于有了因特网，DIY现在已完全变成协作式的了。人们在网上自由地交流思想、分享设计，而不是自己悄悄地搞项目。克里斯·安德森，《连线》杂志的前主编，将创客描述为“创造实物而非仅仅是屏幕上的像素的互联网一代”。

6新车间建于2010年，意思是“新的工场”。它位于一个上海仓库的出租房里。成员们每月支付约16美元就可以使用那里的空间和工具，周三晚上对公众开放。新车间的联合创始人台湾出生的大卫·李是一位40岁的编程员，他想降低实验和娱乐的门槛。“我们并不是想要汇聚一帮子极客做出什么名堂。新车间是一种渠道，它能够让人们说，‘这互动的玩意儿并不那么可怕那么难。’”

7这些能工巧匠中可能会有人研发出下一个突破性的技术，或者说这至少是中国决策者们所希望的。“中国的产业必须改革。它必须迈入下一个阶段。中国现在的产业纯粹是契约型的。我们按照别人的设计来制造，”北京清华大学工业工程学副教授本杰明·顾说。还有人感到不解的是为什么中国没有更多的国际知名品牌或者一位像史蒂夫·乔布斯那样的本地发明家。

8中国政府已经对创客运动产生兴趣。新车间开张后不久，上海的官员们宣布了一项计划,要建立100个由政府扶持的创新工场。据李透露，去年11月，在上海共青团的帮助下，创客嘉年华吸引了逾5万参观者。在那里创客们向公众展示了他们的作品。

9在深圳市，矽递公司同全球的创客合作将他们的硬件设计转换成原型和样品。矽递专门从事小规模生产实验性的利基市场产品。出生在四川的矽递创始人潘昊（音译），也叫埃里克·潘，其目标是补足而非取代大型制造商。“一旦设计红火了，传统的制造商就会有新的产品可做了，”潘先生告诉我。“我们正在提供更多的设计产品。”

10矽递也许是一家企业，但是它仍然认为自己站在中国创客革命的前沿。它招聘员工的广告上是南美革命者切·格瓦拉的照片，他头上长出的是电子元件而不是头发。这张海报号召人们聚在一起“以一种前所未有的方式挑战工业化大规模生产的霸主地位！”

11一些观察人士认为中国的创客运动是其生产山寨产品或者仿制品倾向的又一个例子。但是潘先生建议大家要耐心。“中国刚刚起步，”他说。“你刚开始学习写作时，你写不出小说。你必须照着课本临摹学写A、B、C、D。”

12现在，创客空间给了中国发明者们一个社区。彭女士，那棵会和人互动的树的创造者，说她的生活因为去了新车间而发生了改变，她明白了“那儿有不少跟我差不多的人，他们只是想造些东西，并从中学习。”