This Maker City Shines:
Shenzhen
In a new downtown location covering four city blocks, Maker Faire Shenzhen opened on a Friday with a flurry of government officials taking part in an opening ceremony for Maker Week. Dozens of eager photographers caught their every move from behind, from the side and in front. The politicians and the photographers moved like two flocks of birds. One moves and all in their group move, and then the others move with them. They are silently in sync, all following the lead.
The politicians eventually seated themselves in the first row of seats inside a large tent outside. A local television celebrity introduced them. The Deputy Mayor of Shenzhen spoke with confidence and determination. Later I learned that he said that the maker movement would help “Shenzhen re-invent themselves.”
Eric Pan of SEEED Studio, the local organizer of Maker Faire Shenzhen and most prominent figure in the Chinese maker community, said a few remarks, and then I welcomed everyone to Maker Faire. MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld talked about opening a new Fab Lab in Shenzhen, one that would make other Fab Labs. A group of robotics students took to the stage and the politicians joined them for a photo moment.
Finally, the politicians placed round stickers on a map of Shenzhen’s different districts, which caused the photographers to rush the stage. As they did so, balloons were released inside the tent to some applause from the crowd. In a blur, Maker Faire Shenzhen was off and running. The politicians were quick to walk through Maker Faire and then leave to beat the heat.
The promotional video for Maker Faire Shenzhen, which was played during the event on large outside LCD screens, captures the vision of what the event means for the area.
Shenzhen Speed
Things move fast here in Shenzhen, a city of 10 million, a mega city that considers itself young and capable of anything. Once a fishing village until 30 years ago, it’s become an industrial city with an industrious population. It’s a city of hustle and flow, where the government is in control yet here in Shenzhen, they are also hands-off. It’s become a place where you don’t ask for permission.
There is new construction everywhere. Locals talk about “Shenzhen speed” — crews build high rise towers at a rate of one floor every day. Even at the venue, there are two towers rising nearby, with an upper platform connecting them, and it looms like a huge robot waiting to come to life over Maker Faire Shenzhen. It will be the new HQ for Tencent, the largest Internet company in China and the developers of the ever-present app WeChat, which hugely benefits from the fact that Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China. You can’t meet someone in Shenzhen’s tech community without exchanging WeChat IDs (mine is dalepd55).
At one entrance to Maker Faire stood the huge yellow Transformer-inspired robot that I had seen at last year’s Maker Faire. This version seemed new and improved, and shinier. Yet it didn’t seem quite as tall, given that it was surrounded by a city full of shining high rises.
The Maker City
The previous Maker Faire Shenzhen was held fourteen months ago and it was more like a neighborhood street fair. A lot has happened that made this year’s Maker Faire so massive. The maker movement, which was moving along nicely in Shenzhen and on a smaller scale in places like Shanghai and Beijing, suddenly became a big deal in China.
As I have pieced it together, a few events triggered it. One occurred just before last year’s Maker Faire. Intel CEO Brian Kryzanich came to town to attend the Intel Developer Forum. Because of his interest in the maker community, Kryzanich made a point to visit Eric Pan at the offices of SEEED Studio, who was selling the Intel Edison and Galileo boards and developing their own add-ons. I have heard Kryzanich was impressed by Pan whose first job out of college was as Product Engineer at Intel. Word of the Intel CEO’s visit peaked the interest of some high-level government officials in Beijing — it was curious that the head of one of the world’s largest companies would pay a visit to rather small company in Shenzhen — a company they probably knew little about.
In January of this year, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, the number two man in the government who is known for leading economic reform, came to visit Shenzhen. He stopped by Chaihuo Makerspace in Shenzhen and met with Eric Pan and other makers. Chaihuo Makerspace was one of the first makerspaces in the city, and was sponsored by SEEED Studio. The Chinese Premier must have liked what he saw. An article in China Daily (china.org.cn) said that “Li called on Chaihuo to show the nation’s growing commitment to supporting grassroots innovation and the budding maker movement that is producing it.” The Global Times reported that “Li said makers with creative ideas should be helped to set up their own businesses.”
It might take only a single sentence from a powerful person to set things in motion in China, so I was told by more than one person in Shenzhen.
An article on Want China Times, “Maker Culture To Be Encouraged in China” cited Li Keqiang’s visit and said that the State Council in March established initiatives “for fostering creativity and entrepreneurship.” The initiatives encourage investment in small and medium sized business. The article quotes Li Ouya of the Chaihuo Makerspace:
“Maker culture used to be like underground water, a sub-culture thing here in China, with the water seeping up from the ground. But since the premier’s visit, it has grown into more like a well, with more and more different maker spaces surfacing and taking root across China.”
At the Shenzhen Forum in April, a panel which included the Deputy Mayor Tang Jie of Shenzhen talked about makers fostering creativity and innovation in Shenzhen. China Daily (china.org.cn) quoted the Deputy Mayor:
“Currently, Shenzhen is the most active city in venture capital and private equity investment in China, so the city can support, embrace and understand makers. Makers also should learn to share, and they need a restless, youthful spirit, to cultivate their abilities through practice, and keep creative and imaginative. Shenzhen is to be built as the city of makers.
Suddenly, within a few months time, local and national government officials contacted Eric Pan to learn more about Maker Faire Shenzhen. They wanted to support Maker Faire and create a Maker Week with separate events in each of Shenzhen’s nine districts.
Some Like It Hot
The government’s involvement made the event was “10 times larger,” said Kevin Lau, the lead producer of Maker Faire Shenzhen for SEEED Studio who had to attend a lot more meetings than he ever expected. The new location, called InnoPark, was a cluster of interlocking downtown buildings and overhanging connectors. These buildings are part of a technology incubator supported by the government and meant to encourage startups.
The government support explains the size of the venue, the number of signs promoting the event on the subways and in the streets, the heightened level of security and the presence of enormous signage at the event itself, some hanging from the rising towers under construction. All of it demonstrates that the local government is doing what it can to accelerate the maker movement in China.
The local government also requested moving Maker Faire from April to the middle of June. The June weather in Shenzhen is a suffocating cloud of heat and humidity. It is as hot as, well… The makers had to endure the heat, spread out in four large areas. Finding an air-conditioned oasis with drinking water became a frequent part of each day’s journey.
The government support is making things happen faster and larger than they might have been without that support. I worry that hopes and expectations might be unrealistic. Yet, seeing the number of people who participated in Maker Faire who might not have otherwise is rather astonishing. It’s just another example of Shenzhen speed.
The Shenzhen Maker Shuttle
There are makers I’ve gotten to know who have moved to Shenzhen to work on a product. Some stay three months or three years. Others return to their home but seem to go back frequently.
Alex Hornstein, a maker now living in Providence RI, spent several years living in Hong Kong and Shenzhen after going to MIT. His most recent product is CubeTube, a 3D LED volumetric display. CubeTube comes with a built-in microphone and accelerometer, which allows it to interact to sound and motion. It can run programs that you download from their site or you can create your own.
“We grew up dreaming of holograms from Star Wars — with a 3D image in front of us,” says Hornstein. “We made these simple displays to start exploring what that could be.”
CubeTube raised $250K from 689 backers on a Kickstarter campaign in January of this year. While still taking pre-orders, CubeTube will come as a kit or as a finished product.
Matt Metts is from Pittsburgh, a member of HackPittsurgh. He worked in Brooklyn for MakerBot. For the past three years, he has lived in Guangzhou, China where he runs BlinkenLabs. His products, BlinkyTape and Blinkytile, allow people to create LED based art installations or custom sculptures. He raised $22K on Kickstarter for Blinkytile.
Matt is interested in the intersection of art and technology. “I’m trying to find the most awesome things, and then make them easy and accessible for people to use,” he said.
Kevin Bates is from Portland, Oregon and he came to Shenzhen for four months last year as part of the HAXLR8R program. Kevin was in their booth, showing his ArduBoy prototype, a Gameboy game platform the size of a credit card. His Kickstarter campaign raised $433K from 7,330 backers and closed June 10th.
I asked Kevin why he came up with ArduBoy. He said that he was tired of people asking “What do you do?” and he’d tell them “about a boring day job I have like a data analyst at a shipping and logistics company.” He added: “What I really wanted to share was my Arduino projects.” Now, when someone asks him “What do you do?”, Kevin can show them ArduBoy and say “This is what I do.”
“I want to give my customers the same experience. They can create a game, they can mod it, they can hack it, they can say ‘this is what I do” and share it with their friends.”
I asked Kevin what it is like coming to Shenzhen. “It is overwhelming,” he said. “It was a huge benefit to have the HAX program to create as soft a landing as possible.” He added: “The most important thing to realize is that you are in a new country and a new culture, and it’s time to learn everything over again.”
Makers will go a great distance, learn everything they can, and meet everyone they can, just to be able to turn their idea and their prototype into a real product.
First Name Basis
In Shenzhen, it seems everyone has an adopted English name. It’s usually just a first name and sometimes it is combined with their “first” name in Chinese. Eric Pan’s real name in romanized Chinese is Pan Hao. (Pan is his family name or surname, and it goes first.) Eric is an example of adopted name, generally a name that is more familiar to English speakers. When I asked someone their name, inevitably there is a short pause — a kind of switching gears — as they realize that they need to use their adopted name — John, Mike, Violet, Wayne. I have to say that during that pause, I found myself wondering if they were making up a name on the spot, as if they might say “I’m John today.” How would I know otherwise?
Some of the business cards I was given have this adopted name, usually only the first name in romanized letters. Jasen is the President of Makeblock and that’s the name on the business card he gave me.
I think an adopted name as a polite gesture, one that makes a foreigner like me more comfortable in getting to know someone by name. I was certainly grateful to have a name I could spell. I got to know a lot of makers by first name only.
Mobile Makers
I love that at Maker Faire there are people wandering around with their projects. I saw a homemade cart from a group called Makerpopo from Beijing. It was spinning about on the street and the makers were encouraging young people to go for a spin.
I met a couple of maker/educators from Taiwan who were walking around with a vortex cannon. They had been participating in a student “maker carnival”.
Bill from Shenzhen approached and asked me if I’d try out his electronic muscle stimulator. He put two pads on my arm.
He said it was used for healing. However, it was when we shook hands that I thought he had a fun, if shocking, new product.
The video has my interview with these makers.
Maywa Denki
China needs a little more of what Maywa Denki brought from Japan — fun and nonsense in a very engaging and artful performance. Maywa Denki’s “crazy concert” played Friday night of Maker Faire Shenzhen to a full house and they rocked it.
Maywa Denki makes their own fantastical musical instruments and plays them in a performance. One example is Marimca, a flower-shaped percussion instrument somewhat like a marimba. Its flower petals open to play and then close when finished. My favorite was a saxaphone made out six motorcycle airhorns.
Novumichi Tosa is the founder and lead performer of Maywa Denki. He was joined by four others whom he introduced as Employee A, B, C and D. They are dressed in powder blue jump suits and remind one of Devo. Before each song, Novumichi might say: “Now introduce our new product.” He would talk about this unusual musical instrument and then play music with it. The unexpected thing for me was how wonderful the music itself was — sometimes it was an explosion of unexpected sounds that were truly delightful.
Maywa Denki is the name of a factory in Japan, a factory that belonged to the Maywa Denki’s founder’s family. “My father established the factory in 1969,” Novumichi told me. It designed and made aircraft during World War II and later went bankrupt. Novumichi and his brother took it over and ran it as a factory for making mechanical “nonsense machines.”
I caught up with Novumishi Tosa at the end of Maker Faire Shenzhen and did a short interview with him. I asked him at the end what kind of advice he might have for young people who might like to make their own musical instruments. He replied: “Look for the most interesting thing inside yourself.” He added: “Make your own toys. Don’t buy. Make.”
我是Maker, 我们都是Makers
In general, most of the makers at Maker Faire Shenzhen were commercial. Makers came with their own products to sell. Most of them were small companies with a few products. I saw few makers last year or this year who are hobbyists, who do this for pleasure. Some will say that they don’t have the option of making as hobby, lacking the time and resources to do this unless it helps them make a living. Perhaps that will change over time.
In the video, I interviewed seven makers with a variety of products:
Chris from Rone Design of Shenzhen showed me his new product called Ripple Speaker, a bluetooth speaker that also uses the sound to create a visual effect with water — a kind of sound fountain, looking like a mini lava lamp.
Jerry from Evol.net showed me UARM, a robotic arm aimed at educational users. It is Arduino-compatible.
A woman from Yurobot Studio talked to me (in Chinese) about the boards and other components they create for use by artists.
A woodworker had on display a wide variety of woodcraft, including a well-made chair that I was able to sit in.
A team from Ghost Drones explained that their drone platform was the first to be controlled by a smartphone. I was skeptical.
Nero from Beijing talked about his open source development board. He believes that the maker community in Beijing is more into art and design, unlike Shenzhen.
Danni from Microduino showed me the small-form factor boards that connect together magnetically and also interface with Legos.
Makeblock
One of the Maker Week events was a 48-hour robotics competition organized by Makeblock, Shenzhen-based creators of a construction kit for makers. Maker Open was held about a half-hour away from the site of Maker Faire, in another area of Nanshan district, which I was told was the high-tech center of Shenzhen. However, what I saw was a set of nine largely empty high-rises, owned by the government. Inside the first floor of one of these towers was turned into an elaborate set for the robotics competition called Maker Open.
A dozen teams have been brought to Shenzhen to compete, including a team from the University of Utah. Each team had its own work space. At the center, there was a well-designed showroom of Makeblock components, such as aluminum construction parts, motors and connectors. Adafruit, SparkFun and SEEED also supplied some electronic components. When we arrived, the teams were preparing for their final demonstrations. Joey Hudy was one of the judges.
Nearing the end of the 48-hours, there was evidence of the work that had taken place, including nearly finished projects. Makeblock components were scattered everywhere, but then I’d find a team testing their project — a watercolor bot. There were several variations of drawbots or paintbots.
My guide pointed out that the organizers had solved an important problem — how to feed the teams. She pointed to a rack of locked boxes and explained that makers could use an app to order food and get it delivered to a locker, and receive a text code to unlock one of these boxes. Yum!
I had interviewed Jasen, the founder of Makeblock, at Maker Faire Shenzhen and he showed me his new product, Mbot, which wrapped up its Kickstarter campaign in May, raising $285K from 2,500 backers. Mbot is an educational robot for kids that uses a Scratch-like programming environment to program an Arduino-compatible robot. It will cost about $75. Jasen believes this robot is “affordable for every kid.”
Makeblock’s offices are in a different tower but the same complex as where the MakerOpen was taking place. The government is interested in supporting small startups who can’t afford the rent paid by larger companies in Shenzhen. So Makeblock got a good deal on space in a vacant building.
We visited the office, met with the Makeblock team and saw some of the new products. They are a rapidly growing company, getting started at HAXLR8R. Last year, they raised $6M from Sequoia Capital. Makeblock is the kind of entrepreneurial story that Shenzhen wants more of. Their products are well-designed, nicely packaged and competitively priced. Its growing team has expertise in hardware, software and design. This is a construction kit for the next generation of makers, an Erector Set for the 21st Century.
Make Fashion Show
Shannon and Maria Hoover of Calgary organized the Make Fashion Show on Saturday night. On Saturday morning, I found the team of designers and engineers busy wrapping up their work at Seeed Studio.
A wearables fashion show is a true “demo or die” event. There are lights, music and models in front of an audience full of anticipation. All the preparations, which happen up until last minute, lead up to a live show and the show must go on.
Bringing Makers Together
The UK had an “Underground” exhibit featuring their own makers and a MiniCooper. One of the UK makers wore a T-shirt, which had on the back Maker Faire 2015 and listed five Maker Faires that he was attending this year.
I have the sense that Maker Faire is creating its own network effects, as makers travel and get together in different cities for these events. The community comes together and re-connects. Makers also bring with them the skills — and values — that define the maker community and help it spread from one country to the next.
Shenzhen attracts makers from around the world who want to tap into its people, talents and capacity. Makers from the US, Japan, Canada, Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere are envious of what they visibly see happening in Shenzhen.
I was struck by how inter-connected the makers were, especially through Maker Faire. Makers from Japan who went to Maker Faire Tokyo were here as well as Makers from Taiwan who went to Maker Faire Taipei. The organizers of Maker Faire Shenzhen also brought a number of people from around the world to speak at the event, such as Tom Igoe of NYU’s ITP and Stefania Druga of Berlin.
Sherry Huss, my colleague, who runs Maker Faire at Maker Media, Eric Pan who runs SEEED Studio and organizes Maker Faire Shenzhen, Massimo Banzi who runs Arduino and organized Maker Faire Rome, and Pierre-Alexis Ciavaldini who is part of the team running Maker Faire Paris. Organizers of Maker Faire are meeting with each other and learning from experiencing Maker Faire in other cities.
Eric Pan and SEEED Studio
Eric Pan celebrated his 32nd birthday during Maker Faire Shenzhen. He has become the face of the maker movement in China. His company has grown to 300 people. I believe that everyone one of them was working at Maker Faire Shenzhen. SEEED Studio also moved their officers into InnoPark two weeks before opening Maker Faire Shenzhen. They were very busy, but incredibly friendly hosts.
Massimo Banzi announced that SEEED Studio would begin manufacturing the Genuino line of boards in China. He mentioned a number of initiatives to increase particpation in the Arduino community in China. Massimo showed me the new board and told me that he was quite impressed by the quality of the product.
Kevin Lau of SEEED Studio was the lead event organizer for Maker Faire Shenzhen. Kevin’s assessment that Maker Faire Shenzhen grew ten times in size in 2015 from last year might be an exaggeration. However, attendance over the three days of Maker Faire was around 150,000, up from last year’s 35,000.
There were 228 maker exhibits. “Forty percent of the makers came from overseas. Sixty percent were from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau,” Kevin told me. Sponsors included Intel, Qualcomm and Microsoft.
Eric wrote to me after the event.
Thank you so much for joining us and bless the whole craziness! To me, it’s going to be the one of the best moments Seeed has to remember. We get more certain about the ecosystem we are contributing to, and we’ve convinced our family/friends to believe that, too. We understand more about our steady mission towards the future maker city of Shenzhen, regardless of the over-paced startup scene.
In Shenzhen, it creates a lot of respect to *real* maker culture and invites a lot people to participate. We heard a lot of good gossip praising this Maker Faire from all aspects. The mayor has publicly spoke high of Maker Faire Shenzhen. I think he himself should have felt the positive energy.
Open to Challenges
Clearly, Shenzhen has the capacity to make things, unlike most places. Makers who live there can tap into its manufacturing ecosystem and others go there to do the same. It is not just that you can do things, but you can do things much faster — at Shenzhen speed.
This maker city is full of hard-working people. “The work ethic is the main reason why Shenzhen can move so fast,” said Frank Teng, a former editorial assistant at Maker Media who now lives in Shenzhen. “Yes the resources are here, but it’s really the people who make it work. For example, overtime without pay is pretty much expected here. Work is handled 24/7 on cell phones.” And WeChat.
It makes Shenzhen very competitive. When Jasen of Makeblock told me that his Mbot product on Kickstarter campaign raised over $160K, what impressed me the most was that he delivered the product to his backers just one month after the campaign was funded. My rough sense is that most Americans who run hardware campaigns on Kickstarter take around 18 months to manufacture and fulfill a product — if they are lucky.
I was also amazed by how many makers from China have run successful Kickstarter campaigns. They are learning to use Kickstarter effectively, not only to generate capital but also to market their products. I would bet that most of their backers are not from China.
Shenzhen makers have confidence in knowing that they can make at any scale what they design. The problem has been coming up with their own ideas and designs, something that perhaps the maker movement will change. As a product manager from Qualcomm remarked:
“China’s challenge is going from zero to one. Going from one to many millions is not a problem.”
The products I saw at Maker Faire Shenzhen were interesting but not really innovative. What I took away from my interviews with makers is how many of these makers are young and full of entrepreneurial energy. Many of them graduated from college and started businesses themselves, rather than going to work for a large company. They are working hard and working independently. I expect them to be successful. This is why Shenzhen’s example bodes well for China.
The government recognizes that an important part of their economic future is the growth of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Small is beautiful. Shenzhen offers a place for young people to develop their ideas and turn them into products and grow those product companies into successful businesses. One of the challenges in fostering innovation and startups is that it can be difficult to compete against government-controlled industries. Even government incentives come at a price. Governments that seek to nurture entrepreneurs can also smother them.
What China doesn’t offer is the same kind of openness we enjoy in the West, the kind of openness and sharing we’ve associated with the spread of the Internet. Google, Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China. Yes, one can struggle with unreliable VPNs to get around it. However, I have to believe that for China to participate fully in a creative economy, as a producer and a consumer, the government will need to open up itself more fully to the rest of the world. There’s no getting around it.
Overseas China Makerspace
There is a nice area in Shenzhen, a suburb-inspired, tree-lined, well-lighted place with boutique shops and upscale restaurants. It goes by the name Overseas Chinese Town or OCT. This place is meant to be what a Chinese citizen might see and experience if he or she moved to a foreign city. OCT offers the tangible benefits of living abroad but without leaving China. What if you don’t have to move to the US, Canada or Europe to find a nice suburban lifestyle? What if you can find the life you want here in Shenzhen? OCT has its allure for Chinese as well as foreigners.
Chaihuo Makerspace is located in OCT and the maker movement in China started here — it’s the Overseas Chinese Makerspace. This is where the Chinese Premier came to meet Eric Pan and other makers. It’s where SEEED Studio got its start. Now, after having a such a huge turnout for Maker Faire Shenzhen, Shenzhen’s industrious makers with the backing of the government are spreading the maker movement —and moving as fast as Shenzhen can.
We are makers.
We share passion.
We re-imagine the status quo.
We dream & make the world of tomorrow.
Pierre-Alexis Ciavaldini
Credits: The Camera Crew: King Yip, Anne Huang and Wilson Gu
Translators: Wayne Lin and Frank Teng
