Silvia Lindtner

Stefanie Wuschitz speaks to Silvia Lindtner for the Open Hardware Europe Summit and the Coded Cultures: Openism festival that happened in Vienna on May 19, 2016.

Hello Professor Silvia Lindtner, thank you for your time and commitment to have this conversation with me. I would like to go right to the frst question. The Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance — which is an international organization — has formulated 4 freedoms with which they want to label Open Source Hardware as Open Source Hardware. These are 4 freedoms:

Freedom 0: The freedom to use the device for any purpose.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the device works and change it to make it to do what you wish. Access to the complete design is precondition to this.
Freedom 2: Redistribute the device and/or design (remanufacture).
Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the device and/or design, and release your improvements (and modifed versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefts. Access to the complete design is precondition to this.

Could the implementation of such a label for Open Source Hardware become popular in China, specially in cities as Shenzhen?

So I think my answer to that is gonna be both of perhaps, long and short. Ok, let’s start by saying that: when we think about the importance of Open Source Hardware and why people — you know — think of it as a countercultural movement, as an intervention into how we produce technology today and also how we consume technology today, we also have to see how that particular articulation as we see it for example in the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance — an articulation of what Open Source Hardware means — is very culturally situated.

So when we look at this articulation of 4 freedoms — which means unlimited and unconditional — at least when you look at the website, right? There are notions of — There is the freedom to use the device for any purpose. The freedom to study how the device works and change — change it to make it to do what you wish. Redistribute the device and/or design. Remanufacture it. And the freedom to improve the device.

Now why is that so important, in let’s say, the United States or in Europe? That is so important because it has become really difcult to do that here. And this is again as I said earlier culturally and historically situated.
So if you think back about an era when that actually was possible to do, that was industrial production era, in the United States and in Europe. That was an era when manufacturing was part and parcel of how the modern Western society developed. So much of that — sort of both the ability and freedom to make anything you want and decide how its being used — that has drastically transformed and in part this was shaped by outsourcing, by cooperations that have developed brands, which then have created design principles that structure and organize user participation in a particular kind of way.

So when you think about the Open Source Hardware movement in the West it is very much an intervention in that: it’s saying, well, we have actually lost the ability to easily make and hack things based on what we want them to be. That is not just because the West has outsourced manufacturing, but also because we are now living in a “creative or knowledge economy” where people consume both digital and other types of goods and people have become fairly passive consumers. Rather than active producers. So the question about — does something like this exist in China — has to be understood in relationship to China’s own particular context and history of production.

In China today there is still a lot of manufacturing, although a lot of this is currently also transforming, China is still one of the largest producers of our electronic goods. So actually this notion of bringing back making and manufacturing and enabling people to make or to manufacture is not a big desire, because many people still make a living of of manufacturing and of hacking things open, opening them up and recycling components out of old and discarded devices. That’s part and parcel of a vast manufacturing ecosystem that exists mostly in the South of China but also in other parts of China. In some ways Open Source Hardware in China means both something similar and different. It’s not really an intervention in enabling many people to produce, because many people in China still produce. And at the same time you see an Open Source and Maker movement that has evolved in China since roughly 2008. But the desires and the kind of unique counterculture that has moved in China needs to be understood in relationship to China’s own culture and history of continued manufacturing there.

And so just to give you a sort of more specific example, when we think about Open Source Hardware and what it means in the West, or when we look at the website of the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance, its very much so this idea that production should be democratized, its an individual right that anyone should have to make their own device according to their own ideals. To also have the right to hack a device that they get from somebody else perhaps. So when you look at manufacturing in China or what has evolved over the last 30 years is an Open Source production culture that is both in some ways very similar and then also in many ways different from this notion of Open Source Hardware production in the West.

Most people think of manufacturing in the South of China through companies such as Foxconn, that produces for Apple… so people think of very large scale manufacturing industries that mass-produce for for example Western cooperations. But what very view people know about though is that over the last 20 years there emerged another informal economy of production in Shenzhen, in the South of China. You can think of it as a kind of entrepreneurial effort that started to develop in the gaps of the global economy, in the shadows of large contract manufacturing. These were factories that in the beginning were largely family owned — that have moved from Hong Kong to Shenzhen — which is really just a subway ride away, and they were in the 70s mostly producing retail goods and these were largely copycat goods. For example the copycat Gucci bag or the copycat Nike shoe. And they saw an opportunity emerge as electronics manufacturing had moved to Shenzhen. So it was part of the outsourcing boom in the United States and in Europe, most of the industrial production had moved to parts of Asia and the South of China in particular. So they saw and opportunity to say, well we produced copycat retail for niche markets, so for people who couldn’t afford the expensive Gucci bag. They produced copycats which then would go for example and be bought by the migrant worker, to people — again — who could not afford the more expensive product.

So they started partnering and working together, these were in the beginning really small scale entities, family owned businesses that started collaborating and produce mobile phones for niche markets. So these were mobile phones for migrant workers — again, people who could maybe not afford the expensive iPhone would then be able to afford a cheaper device — perhaps more low end — but still serving a particular kind of need.

Now this industry has scaled quiet rapidly in about ten years and is now producing smart phones for niche markets outside of China. At the beginning it started out by producing phones for migrant workers in China and now a lot of these phones are being sold in Africa, in India, in Latin America and so on. It is now actually a multi billion dollar industry, people make a lot of money with this. Its not anymore just small scale entrepreneurs — its actually a big network of many manufacturers.

You might wonder then, how was this possible? How was it possible for these at the beginning really small scale factories to actually compete with big international cooperations like Nokia and Apple? And actually tap into entirely new markets? So what they did, and this is sort of what I have been following in my research in Shenzhen over the last three years, is to understand what made that possible. And what made it possible is an Open Source production principle applied to manufacturing. So basically what is at the heart of this Open Source production culture is a board. It’s a physical board, also called a reference board in manufacturing, which you could compare to kind of an upscale Arduino board, but applied to manufacturing. The board itself is completely open. It comes with an “Open bill of materials”, which is a list of materials with all the components that go into producing a device. For example the Apple iPhone comes with its own bill of materials or the Samsung smart phone comes with its own bill of materials. So the bill of materials for this reference board that goes into producing — let’s say — a smart watch or a mobile phone is completely open and shared amongst hundreds of factories, in the Perl River Delta in the South of China around the city of Shenzhen. And by openly sharing these reference boards entrepreneurs factories, factories that have an entrepreneurial spirit in the South of China can very quickly bring products to the market.

Think about how you work with the Arduino: you basically go online, you see what other people do with the board, you learn by looking at what other people do with the board, you build on top of existing practices and experiences, right? You might modify a lot of things and over time you might build completely new things, right? The same is true with that board, so people basically could take one of these reference boards and not modify anything and just attach a unique shell to it, that makes it look like a very unique phone, but comes with a fairly standard capability. But you could for example sell that phone uniquely designed on the outside for a new market, let’s say somewhere in France. But you could also make slight modifcations to the board, which is very easy to do, because, again, it is openly shared. So you might just attach a new component to it or change some of the components and then again create a unique shell to it and tap into a completely diferent market. This Open Source Culture applied to manufacturing has allowed companies — and these are factories — to produce fairly quickly. It’s a kind of agile manufacturing process that thrives through an Open Source sharing mentality. And so products like a new mobile phone can go from an idea to production in very short periods of time, so sometimes you can take an idea to market within only 30 days. That would not have been possible if it wasn’t for the manufacturing culture that has emerged in the South of China in the last 30 years.

So when we talk about Open Source Hardware and Open Source manufacturing in China we have to understand that particular history of production in China. And in that sense as I said earlier its both similar and different from this notion of Open Source Hardware in the West, because there is a kind of notion to never build from scratch, to build on each other’s work, to share openly, to re-distribute and re-manufacture, so a big integral component of Shenzhen is that a lot of broken and discarded devices come back to Shenzhen.

So what factories also do there is that they open them up and take out the components that are still usable and then use these still working components and put them into new devices. So there is a kind of re-use and re-cycle infrastructure that is built into this open manufacturing ecosystem. And so again, the ethos in that sense is very similar, because it’s also about re-use and re-cycle, but it’s driven less so by a countercultural spirit, as it is the case for example with the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance. Its less opposition, as an intervention in consumer culture and passive consumer cultures as I said in the beginning. But it’s a “making do” mentality, it’s a kind of Open Source spirit that is driven by necessity. So a lot of these early entrepreneurs in the South of China they themselves were migrants, they tried to make a better living, for their own families, so the Open Source practice came out of a desire or need to collaborate in order to actually compete with larger players on the market and to make a better living.

So the Open Source Hardware revolution has happened there already long time ago? It’s not necessary?

Yes, that’s a good way of putting it, yes. And you know it’s interesting too, because a lot of that is changing right now. So just to give you a little bit of a sense of what is going on in China with regards to making and Open Hardware:

So the Chinese government since 2015 has strongly endorsed making. The Chinese Vice Prime Minister Li Keqiang in January 2015 visited the local hackerspace in Shenzhen. So the same city I was just talking about in the South of China. And he was super excited about what he saw there. He celebrated this particular hackerspace called Chaihuo as a place for entrepreneurial creativity and for new innovation. And he went back to Peking and declared a new national policy that postulates making and Open Hardware as a new approach towards entrepreneurship and innovation in China.

And there are no patents on no level of this development? There is no point where they licence their products? It’s always completely open?

You mean in the hackerspaces?

For example, if they make a new shell with Open Source Hardware, the whole thing is still open, right? Maybe it’s not a very relevant question. But…there is no patenting, no licensing on any level, right?

Exactly. Well,…so what I was trying to get at with Li Keqiang is that a lot of this is changing though. So what has happened historically — and this was really sort of at the height of this manufacturing, it was at it’s height in 2008 — but…so what happened is that we could call them white labelling products. So they didn’t come with a brand, there were no patents, and you could buy them not just in the markets in China, but also at WallMart for example in the United States. But they would be sold as a particular kind of brand in the United States or in Europe or in Africa now. But the company in Africa or in the West would just attach a label onto the device even though it’s completely designed and manufactured in China. But in that sense there is no infrastructure like the patent system that’s put in place during the production process.

But I was bringing up Li Keqiang, and this new policy, because a lot of this is changing. This open source manufacturing culture is considered now as something bad, something that China has to overcome. Something that is backwards, because it’s associated with copycat. So what the Chinese government is now saying is that Shenzhen should

become more like the Silicon Valley in the United States, should become more like the hackerspace in the West. And actually write patents and have their companies go IPO, develop brands in order to develop proft margins. So there is now a looking towards the West to apply these sort of models of open hardware and Silicon Valley type kind of innovation culture in order to make what is happening in China look more international, look more globalized, make it look like “yes, this is legitimate design and innovation work”. And what is happening in the process is that a lot of this very creative Open Source Hardware production culture is basically disappearing and is being de-legitimized.

This is terrible, it’s so sad! And what is happening to the hackerspaces?

Alright, so with that new policy that went into place in January, the policy was called — if you translate it directly into English — ‘mass makerspace initiative’. And you could also translate it into ‘mass innovation’ or ‘mass entrepreneurship’. And what has happened since is that the government has made a lot of money available for all kinds of people to build up makerspaces. So you now see.. within just a couple of months…China suddenly moved from only sort of like 40 makerspaces into thousands of makerspaces. So you now have factories that have makerspaces, libraries that have makerspaces, highschools that have makerspaces and everyone now is building a makerspace/hackerspace, because that’s now where funding is made available. And again it’s that vision to say, well, if we have makerspaces then we can train people in a kind of entrepreneurial attitude that they need to develop in order to keep our economy going.

Is it educational sites that also impose an ideology on citizens?

Yes, very much so, because the Chinese economy — you might have read this on the news — has experienced extreme dramatic increase ever since China opened up, but then has slowed, so the dramatic economic growth has significantly slowed over the last years. And so there is of course anxiety about where the jobs are gonna be and how can we also avoid social uprising, if people are dissatisfied and are unemployed, you know? So makerspaces are now seen as kind of incubator programs — you might say — to cultivate entrepreneurial citizenship in some way. Where people learn how to become entrepreneurs through hands-on making, open source hardware tinkering. And that’s considered the way to go for the future of China. And again, this is not unique in China, the Obama-administration is doing something very similar — European Union is doing something very similar. This is really a much more global phenomenon where you see governments in Europe, in the United States, in China, in other parts of Asia and in other parts of the world making an argument for how hardware tinkering and making can be a particular fruitful approach to training people to become entrepreneurs. It’s really interesting how it works across regions. How that is something that people, governments and cooperations believe in and argue for across different regions.

Thank you so much for the interview.