Abstract
Since the 1990s, the emphasis on the economic significance of culture and creativity by policy makers, urban planners and researchers has contributed to the global development of (as well as debate on) the creative economy. This movement has particularly taken off in China alongside the transition from the ‘Made in China’ campaign to the ‘Created in China’ campaign. In recent years, the focus of creative industries development in China has shifted from the convergence of culture and technology, and now also includes the convergence of culture, creativity and design with related industries, covering almost all of the sectors of the national economy. Meanwhile, a movement of ‘mass entrepreneurship and innovation’ is being promoted by redefining the international maker culture. In this context, the article investigates the kinship between the maker movement and the creative economy from the perspectives of communities, spaces, activities, policies and innovation, and whether these conjure up a transition from ‘Created in China’ to ‘Intelligent Manufacturing in China’. And for the creative economy, this raises the question: is it turning to a technological future?
The history of making can be dated back to the making of tools by our ancestors. It has gone through a long process of cultural evolution involving hunting, gathering, farming and crafting. By the time of the invention of the steam engine and electricity, active applications of making were the true driving forces for the first and second industrial revolutions (Mokyr, 2009). In the era of the information and knowledge economy, the resurgence of the global maker movement is said to be driving a third industrial revolution, by facilitating the application of internet intelligence to real-world problems (Anderson, 2012). Although Chaos Computer Club, the first makerspace (or hackerspace), 1 was born in Berlin in 1981 (Davies, 2017: 31–3), the curtain was not raised on the contemporary maker movement until the launch of Make Magazine and the first ‘Maker Faire’ in 2005 and 2006 in the USA, which brought maker communities and their work to a wider public.
Maker faires organised or licensed by Make Magazine may properly be used to map the movement. According to makerfaire.com, 813 faires have flourished over the 10 years from 2005 to 2015 (Figure 1), travelling from the US to Europe (Rome), South America (Santiago), Australia (Adelaide and Sydney) and Asia (Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Chengdu etc.). The flagship events remain in the USA, but the locally focused mini faires tell an important part of the story.
Ten-year growth of maker faires
Another sign of the growth and internationalisation of a contemporary maker movement is Fab Labs. Born at MIT, Fab Labs are now established as a network involving more than 50 countries. This includes not only labs built by acquiring standard equipment and services from the Fab Foundation, but also elements of makerspaces: public access, a common set of tools and processes to enable cross-region work, and participation in a global Fab Lab network. 2 An annual conference is held in different cities, which includes workshops facilitating making with new technology, as well as new project presentations and sharing of experiences relating to running labs. At the end of the conference, a summit is held to discuss the future of the global network.
In August 2016, the global Fab Lab conference took place in China: Shenzhen Fab12. It brought together around 2000 makers from over 700 Fab Labs and 55 countries/regions to promote ‘Fab 2.0’, characterised by ‘machine makes machine’. Fab 2.0 begins with the premise that in the future, machines will not only self-replicate but also produce new tools. Several cities formed a Fab City Network (Figure 2), with the vision of ‘globally connected and locally sufficient’, and a dedication to drive a city-wide digital revolution.
Roadmap of Fab City Network
The maker movement has found widespread favour among governments, as it combines technological innovation, modern manufacturing and the cultural and creative industries. The US Obama administration announced its goal of becoming a ‘nation of makers’ and initiated policies and regulations in support of makerspaces, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) education and start-ups. 3 Though President Obama encouraged state governors to support makers, the maker movement in the USA is most often advocated for by maker communities themselves, as well as technological companies like Intel and Autodesk, supported at government-department level, that is, the Department of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, NASA, etc. The distributed nature of support for the maker movement in the US suggests that its momentum is likely to persist in spite of the change of administration.
By contrast, the maker movement in the UK is much more closely related to design, crafts and the artisan spirit, with a strong focus on community-building. The British government also shows a strong interest in research on makers, which secured its pioneering status in articulating and developing public policy to support the creative economy. The British Council and Nesta (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) have supported research programs which led to the first mapping documents of the regional maker movement including Open Dataset of UK Makerspaces: A User’s Guide (Sleigh et al., 2015) and Made in China: Makerspaces and the Search for Mass Innovation (Saunders and Kingsley, 2016). Furthermore, the British Council co-organised a ‘Hello Shenzhen’ project in 2017, for which ten makers from Shenzhen were selected to visit and reside in seven makerspaces in London, Sheffield, Liverpool and Brighton, while seven British makers came to visit Shenzhen for three weeks. The project aims to promote creative exchanges and the connection of manufacturing for the two countries.
In the Netherlands, more than five cities have set up Fab Labs, including Amsterdam, Amersfoort, Utrecht, Groningen and The Hague. These labs aspire to become interactive hot spots of traditional design and open-source manufacturing. One of the most spectacular Fab Labs is the Waag Society (fablab.waag.org), which is situated in two historic buildings in central Amsterdam: the de Waag at Nieuwmarkt Square, and the Huis de Pinto, which is the only remaining monument on Sint Antoniesbreestraat. Fab 6 was hosted at de Waag in October 2010, with an opening event called ‘open-source banquet’ – guests are provided with food materials, cookers and recipes from instructable.com, and then, yes, cook, share and upload your own recipe.
In Spain, the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) in Barcelona hosted a Fab Lab where a solar-powered fab house was assembled with wood processed by a computer numerical control (CNC) cutting machine. The house was itinerantly exhibited using a truck to promote a movement of ‘social construction’, and the Lab has become the base of Barcelona’s city planning activities. 4
In Japan, the idea is to turn monozukuri (Japanese culture of ‘making things’) into a modern maker movement, with the spread of Fab Labs and co-working spaces. Loftwork, a company offering space design, or ‘creative approach for innovation’, has opened a ‘fabcafe’ in Tokyo, and then in Taipei, Barcelona, Bangkok, Toulouse and Kyoto. A fabcafe was opened in Singapore in October 2016, housed by the ArtScience Museum. 5 There are also interesting Zen Hack Weekends, taking place in a Buddhist temple, where veggie meals and meditation are interspersed between programming and brainstorming. 6 In order to bring together the various maker spaces, Arts Council Tokyo sponsors a platform called Tokyo Fabbers. 7 Hiroya Tanaka, the author of Fablife (2015), who believes that the 21st century belongs to Asia, contends that Fab Lab is looking for the integration of two extremes – bits and atoms, data and products, virtual and reality, software and hardware, local and global, technology and ecology. Thus the core of Fab Lab is, in fact, Asian philosophy (see Figure 3).
The Fab Lab philosophy from Asia (Tanaka, 2015: 151)
Globalised as it is, the maker movement is not just for developed countries. Developing economies like India and South Africa are also promoting maker projects to meet their local needs. Making becomes a mechanism for tackling social inequity by providing opportunities for accessing tools and knowledge for residents, especially the young and disadvantaged. The maker movement is tied in with the ‘appropriate technology’ movement in India and its Jugaad culture. In South Africa, the City of Ekurhuleni has invested in several makerspaces in slums and has promised to build a Fab City.
China is one of the countries embracing the maker movement with open arms. As the ‘world factory’, it plays an important role in the global maker movement in terms of agile, flexible and low-cost manufacturing. However, its ambition extends far beyond this, having already experienced two decades of creative transformation and high-tech development. The future is envisioned in Made in China 2025, that is, transitioning from a big manufacturing country to a strong one, with a greater emphasis on innovation, new-generation information technology, intelligent manufacturing and a robust multi-player talent development structure. 8
From ‘individual creativity’ to ‘individual manufacturing’
After the release of the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) definition of the creative industries, with an emphasis on ‘individual creativity’, Leadbeater and Oakley (1999) labelled a new breed of ‘independents’ (or self-employed) as the driving force of this new sector. Nevertheless, independence of identity and work does not make the independents ‘lonely only entrepreneurs’ (Schoonhoven and Romanelli, 2001). On the contrary, they have to combine their individualistic values with cooperative work. In addition, the independents are members of a wider creative community. Generally, they have a core discipline such as painting, design, photography or animation. These skills are essential to the creative process, but they need to be combined with the skills of others: producers, set designers, actors, musicians or even financiers. Creative communities can provide ideas, contacts, complementary skills, venues and access to the market; they also induce rivalry and competition as well as promote cooperation and collaboration (Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999: 25). Caves (2000) identified the ‘motley crew’, with diversified skills, who are the core group for producing complex creative products like films.
Likewise, Florida’s ‘creative class’ (2002) includes people from a wide range of occupations who are particularly creative and innovative, and who require more life amenities and a tolerant environment in the cities where they reside. The distinction between Florida’s ‘super-creative core’ and the ordinary creative professional is that the former work to identify problems, while the latter endeavour to solve problems. The super-creative core is mostly tech-based, while professionals are service-oriented. Although criticised as elitist, the concept of the ‘creative class’ has become a more general term via Florida’s ‘three T’ index – talent, technology and tolerance – for urban planners. Research on the ‘creative class’ has promoted the development of scholarship in the creative economy and creative cities, on the premise that the more the talent (or ‘creative class’), the more vibrant and economically successful a city could be (Florida 2005). The study of creative occupations is continued in Cunningham and Higgs’s (2008) ‘creative trident’, which is developed to measure creative employment, not only in the creative industries but also across the economy generally.
Following research on the ‘micro-productivity’ of consumer-users and the identification of ‘prosumers’, Hartley et al. (2015) asks: ‘Is it possible to have a “creative economy” based on the creativity of the whole population, not just on existing artistic elites, professional designers and an “expert pipeline” model of copyright-protected creativity?’ (2015: 45). The answer is yes. The DCMS definition does not confine creativity to any particular group of people. Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation recognised the key role of ‘lead users’ in product innovation (von Hippel, 2005). The 2006 Nobel prize-winner in economics, Edmund Phelps, explored the reason for economic prosperity in some countries from the 1820s to the 1960s. He found that modern values like willingness to participate in innovation, exploration and taking on risky challenges induce the vitality of the grassroots economy, which is the root of independent innovation. Individual activities of conceiving, developing and promoting new products and processes, or of solving a problem in reality, induced the dramatic growth of wealth as well as the achievement of meaningful jobs, self-realisation and individual growth for everyone (Phelps, 2013; see also McCloskey, 2016). The power of self-organised social networks is also evident in Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody! (2008), where socialised tools have not only enabled ‘everybody’ to become journalists, editors or photographers, but also their group actions may drive real social change. These are all direct ancestors of a modern ‘maker movement’.
An accurate definition of makers is ‘groups of people using the internet and the newest industrial technologies to make individual manufacturing products’ (Anderson, 2012). Anderson categorises makers into three groups: ‘zero to 1 makers’ – those who wish to learn to use tools to make; ‘makers to makers’ – those who have their own field of interest and are working with other makers on projects; and ‘makers to market’ – those who have an ambition to commercialise their work. Though the emphasis is on open-source digital manufacturing, Make Magazine includes categories of crafts, arts and design. Similarly, Kickstarter raises funds for film-making, and the Instructables website provides recipes. Hence makers could be ‘everyone’!
In the context of a creative economy, ‘makers’ are readers as well as critics, viewers as well as writers and music lovers as well as producers. Outside of the definitive boundary of the creative economy (if there is one), makers apply ‘internet intelligence’ to the real world. The motivation is either DIY (do-it-yourself), DIWO (do-it-with-others), DIT (do-it-together), or to provide an (alternative) solution for a problem in real life.
While the ‘independents’ and ‘creative class’ are professionals, and possibly entrepreneurs, makers are mostly hobbyists and amateurs; in other words, making is not necessarily part of their job, but has the potential to become a dominant activity. Anderson’s three categories constitute a pyramid, with ‘0 to 1 makers’ at the bottom, ‘makers to makers’ in the middle and ‘makers to market’ on top. However, in China, ‘makers’ are often equated with ‘innovators’ and ‘entrepreneurs’. Here, the relationship among the three categories is in a shape of inverted pyramid (Figure 4).
The usual pyramid of makers and the inverted pyramid of makers in China
According to the White Book of the 2015 Report of Mass Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development in China, 9 released by the National Development and Reform Commission, 4.4 million new firms were registered in 2015, an increase of 21.6%; that is, 12,000 firms are registered every day, or 8 start-ups are born every minute. University students and graduates, overseas returnees, technological R&D professionals and migrant workers returning home are the major force in this movement. This is not a new career trajectory for the ‘creative class’, which is characterised by ‘portfolio work’. These new makers are probably the new ‘creative class’, which could include everyone if they were provided with the physical tools and online knowledge sharing. Just as precariousness has caught the attention of many scholars (e.g. Standing, 2011), where job security is not provided by firms or even bureaus (shiye danwei) but by personal skills, so must mass entrepreneurship beware when the rate of failure is high. Instead of a ‘cherry-picking’ strategy that is used in developing the creative economy in China, mass entrepreneurship needs better support mechanisms to cover the investment in the early stage and the cost of ‘failure’, to encourage the entrepreneurs to innovate in a ‘frugal’ way.
From precincts to makerspaces
According to the UK DCMS, creative industries are characterised by ‘clusters’; furthermore, ‘some creative businesses flourish particularly well when they form clusters – groups of competing and co-operating businesses that enhance demand for specialist labour and supply networks in a particular location’ (DCMS, 2008: 56). This is supported by scholars in their research on film and television production, represented by Hollywood (Scott, 2004). However, it is arguable, as I have shown in my typology of creative places (Wen, 2012), that the idea of clustering would be improved by adding ‘quarters’ from urban planning and ‘scenes’ from cultural studies. The key idea is that culture-led urban regeneration and ‘nodes of creative exchange’, exemplified by events and the night economy (‘scenes’), are part of the picture; in addition, the interaction between culture and the economy in city spots shapes the creative landscape of the city.
O’Connor and Gu (2014) argued that ‘spontaneous’ clusters become less likely when urban planning, property development and culture become the central driving force in strategic urban planning. They may therefore not expect that ‘clustering’ almost became a ‘mandatory’ approach for creative industries development in China. This includes the initiatives of designating animation bases, and of establishing loft parks and creative precincts in cities (Keane, 2011). In recent years, ‘cultural tourism’ has become a hot topic, redeveloping a historic block into a site of cultural tourism by retaining the cultural and historical flavour while providing for both traditional (i.e. Chinese opera, or tea) and ‘western’ consumption (i.e. shopping, coffee and drama). This is incorporated in the national plan for ‘creative towns’, with a specific emphasis on industries beyond the creative industries as usually defined. Some other precincts started a process of community development, to attract tourists as well as local residents with events like exhibitions and festivals. The OCT Loft Creative Culture Park in Shenzhen has followed this path. Some precincts in a less favourable geographical location are smart enough to use events to bring in creative teams and participants to a suburban area and then to select teams to reside there. Examples can be seen in the G&G Creative Community and iFactory, both in Shekou of Nanshan district, Shenzhen.
Though 3D printers are aiming at household use, CNC machines, laser-cutting machines and so on, still need to be kept in a large space. Hence, makerspaces are more important in China, as it would be too much of a luxury for everyone to have a garage for tinkering, particularly in the cities where the creative class concentrates, followed by the rise of housing prices. Internationally, a makerspace is ‘a community-related physical space where people can meet and work on their projects’. The mapping of Fab Lab is shown in Figure 2, and currently 2135 makerspaces are listed at hackerspaces.org, with 1325 active ones. The map shows only 11 makerspaces in China, which is far from the claimed total of over 3000 spaces for ‘mass innovation’ . The 11 makerspaces listed are most likely to be international ones – and they are all located in the southern part of China (Figure 5).
The most active 500 hackerspaces
Many scholars have tried to classify makerspaces. In line with their purposes, they could be commercial or non-commercial; and there could be over ten types of makerspaces according to their modes of operation. However, a simpler classification of makerspaces may follow Anderson’s three groups: the three types of makerspaces would be for makers, for innovators and for entrepreneurs. Again, the pyramid is upside down in China – incubators have boomed, innovation labs are increasing at a reasonable rate, while there are in fact only small numbers of makerspaces.
This is because the official name of makerspaces in China is ‘zhongchuang kongjian’ – ‘group innovation space’ (see Leadbeater, 2009). Over 1300 such spaces are designated by the Ministry of Science, and thus included in the incubator system. The General Office of the State Council (2015) defines a group innovation space as:
A new kind of low-cost, accessible, total-factor and open service platform for start-ups which is accustomed to the traits and needs of innovation and entrepreneurship in the era of network, established by market mechanism, professional service and capitalisation.
Specifically, such a space should be easier to access than that of incubators, and provide a service for grassroots entrepreneurs; it is the ideal work space, online space, networking space and resources-sharing space. Furthermore, it is a comprehensive ecosystem, providing services including training, investment, business-model consulting, team-building, government funding application, business registration, legal affairs and finance, as well as media promotion.
In this sense, the most suitable form might be ‘co-working’ spaces at the pre-stage of incubators providing a certain level of services. The cost could be low depending on the location, décor and fittings, as well as the services provided. Following the model of WeWork, the top co-working spaces include SOHO 3Q, UR WORK, Nash Work, Kr Space, Fountown, 3W Space, Simplywork, Tech Temple and Wedo, etc. 10 A group innovation space is therefore different from ‘makerspaces’. It has to be commercial, while makerspaces could be not-for-profit. Tools, sharing, open-source and DIT are key for makerspaces, while for a group innovation space, an affordable working space, support in the start-up business phase and links to investors are the key elements.
There are, of course other forms of makerspaces in China, some of which display the real spirit of making, for instance Chaihuo Makerspaces, SZ DIY and the increasing number of Fab Labs. Incompatible with the fruitful research in the field are the actual library makerspaces: libraries in China are yet to take research into practice. Some libraries opened their makerspace without knowing exactly what a makerspace is. For instance, the Shenzhen Library has opened a makerspace/digital learning lab on the fourth floor. The weekend classes for kids, co-organised by some training institutions, are said to be popular. However, on a weekday, it is more likely to be a ‘maker research lab’, as it displays books and tools for the ‘maker movement’; the two 3D printers are unplugged and the computers are occupied by people playing video games or reading the stock lines. No staff operate the space on weekdays. Certainly, Shenzhen Library has its core mission, and it takes the lead in technological R&D in the field of library equipment. But in terms of maker development, it might need to learn from its peer, the makerspace ‘New Triangle’ at Changsha Library in Hu’nan province. With support from Chaihuo Makerspace, this library provides over 200 sets of tools and a variety of workshops for citizens. 11
Will makerspaces change the creative landscape of urban China? That’s possible. Chaihuo Makerspace was first located in a corner of Seeed Studio. It then moved to the OCT Loft Creative Culture Park, with the purpose of mixing engineers with a group of artists, designers and musicians. 12 Unexpectedly, the Loft welcomed Chaihuo, even though there is a long queue of applications for space. It then became the most visited space in the Loft after 4 January 2015, when Premier Li Keqiang visited Chaihuo and became an honorary member. Many other creative industries parks also set up makerspaces as start-up incubators. For instance, the Shenzhen University Town Creative Park has developed an ecosystem, from maker containers (free working space for one year) to maker-box (incubators), and then to the Productivity Mansion in Songshanhu, Dongguan City (accelerator). The iFactory mentioned above initiated a project named ‘maker forest’, and signs for the ‘maker culture’ are everywhere (Figure 6). There is even a ‘Cultural Maker Precinct’ in Longgang district, Shenzhen, though it is in fact a precinct with start-ups in creative businesses.
A snapshot at iFactory
Kera (2012) argues that what defines a makerspace is not the type of official organisation, but sharing technology, the process of governance and values that relate to open-source software, hardware and data. Daniel Charny from Kingston University initiated a Maker Library Network (MLN) project with the British Council that aims to connect the designers and makers in the world. 13 In MLN, a makerspace could be independent, an add-on, a caravan and even a pop-up, and it requires the participation of government, universities, schools and citizens. The construction of a makerspace is different from the growth coalition of creative industries parks involving government, property developers, universities and creatives. Makerspaces not only bring technological elements to the creative sector and encourage cross-boundary cooperation, but also march ‘creative spaces’ into libraries, universities and, most importantly, into schools.
From expo to carnivals
Since culture became the new asset of urban development in the ‘fifth wave’ of city dynamics (Montgomery, 2007), renovating cultural sites and initiating cultural events has become a panacea for urban regeneration. Cultural festivals in cities are greatly promoted by international networks of cities, such as the ‘European Capital of Culture’ and the UNESCO ‘creative cities network’. Initiated in 1981, cities applying for the title of European Capital of Culture (two are named for each year) has to provide a list of cultural events all year around. The aim of the network is to strengthen the identity of ‘European citizenship’ and prosperity of ‘European culture’. By comparison, UNESCO’s ‘creative cities network’ is more open (it is not restricted to European cities), and the cities have to show their dedication to putting creative industries first in their approach to urban development. This network has now involved 116 cities from 54 countries in seven fields: crafts and folk art; design; film; gastronomy; literature; music; and media arts. The network aims to strengthen cultural exchange and promote creative business cooperation among the members. 14
Shenzhen, as the first ‘city of design’ in China, has launched a ‘Shenzhen Creative Design Award’, which is intended to bring Shenzhen design to international awareness. Shanghai, China’s second ‘city of design’, is dedicated to international exchanges with other cities in the network. It also launched a ‘Creative Design Award for Future Life’, which has collected design work from around the world.
The indigenous event for creative industries in China is the Cultural and Creative Industries Expo. The first of its kind, unexpectedly, was in Shenzhen, a pioneer in opening up and reform, but referred to at the time as a ‘cultural desert’. The event is named China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair (hereafter referred to as ‘ICIF’). It is the only national cultural industries fair which is also approved by the Global Association of the Exhibition Industry (UFI) in China. 15 The China Beijing International Cultural and Creative Industry Expo (ICCIE) started in 2006. With the identity of an ‘international gala’, its mission is ‘presenting a splendid, market- and standard-based expo up to the highest international and professional standards’. 16 The Shanghai Expo took shape in ‘Shanghai International Creative Industries Week’. It was hosted by different precincts in turn to promote each one. Since 2012, it has been taken over by the ‘Shanghai Design Week’. Besides the main cities, cultural expos are organised in many other provinces and cities like Shandong and Xi’an. However, as with ‘animation festivals’ in China, the expos are often criticised as unfocused and homogenised.
Iconic events for makers are the Maker Faire and the annual meeting of Fab Labs. Again, Shenzhen is the first city in China to host the Maker Faire and the Fab Summit. It was also a branch and then the main venue of the National Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation Week (shuangchuang zhou, hereafter referred to as Mass Innovation Week). Growing from a mini-faire in 2012, the Shenzhen Maker Faire is now featured at city-level. In 2015, as the major event of the Shenzhen Venue of Mass Innovation Week, it reached its peak with approximately 200,000 visitors. In 2016, though the event was postponed because of a typhoon, it still claimed 60,000 visitors; and because of the separation from Mass Innovation Week, the Maker Faire theme turned reverted to being ‘for fun’. The second Maker Faire was held in Chengdu in December 2016, with the support of Chaihuo Makerspace. According to Su Haiyan, one of the organisers from Chaihuo, Chengdu is a city with the charisma of ‘technology’. 17
The 2016 Mass Innovation Week saw a ‘tornado of makers’. Premier Li Keqiang organised a Global Entrepreneurial Leaders Forum, inviting Tim Cook (CEO of Apple), Ralph Wiegmann (Chair of German iF Design Award), Jack Ma (CEO of Alibaba), Pony Ma (CEO of Tencent), and Eric Pan (CEO of Seeed Studio) and others among the ‘global super brains’ to participate. Achievements in innovation in technology, products and processes are exhibited during the Week; hacker marathons and workshops are organised. The Ministry of Science stated that ‘the curtain will never fall’. The achievements are broadcast via its WeChat Public Account.
There are also school maker faires and maker carnivals, and hackathons like Intel Hackathons have bubbled up in cities. A maker caravan project was initiated by the biggest online maker community in China – DFRobot and the TV program Maker Planet. In May 2015, loaded with robots, drones, 3D printers and maker projects, the caravan departed from Shanghai and travelled to Beijing, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Chengdu and Wenzhou, taking a month to cover 7000 km. The most meaningful part was travelling to rural parts of China, offering opportunities for the young generation to access modern technology and tools.
The relationship between creative industries events and maker events is obvious. ICIF has included a special venue for makers since 2015. In a sub-branch of ICIF, the Lychee campus (Shenzhen University) venue was themed ‘open-source innovation, makers assembled’ in 2016. The China High-tech Fair and the Shenzhen International Industrial Design Fair also reserve spaces for makers’ projects.
Maker faires are, to some extent, similar to creative markets, which are still popular in some cities, except that maker faires are more about technology, interaction, involvement and fun. There are also TV programs on makers, such as America’s greatest makers by Intel, MGM and TBS, and the TV program We Are the Hero, featuring entrepreneurs, broadcast on CCTV2 in China. The we-media also play an important role, as some start-up makers live broadcast their projects. The 8-year-old maker Saarang Sumesh from India set up his own channel on YouTube to upload videos on his project when he was 5. His profile says: ‘I want to spread the awareness about Robotics and Electronics.’ 18 So this is not just about the things he made, but also about the potential that ‘everyone’ could exploit. In this way, the physical events and media for the maker movement conjure up a bigger creative scene. 19
From ‘culture +’ to ‘internet +’ and Made in China 2025
Aiming at a development from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’, China started to focus on creative industries with a division between wenhua shiye (cultural institutions) and wenhua chanye (cultural industries) (Keane and Hartley, 2006). In recent years, creative industries (chuangyi chanye) development in China has shifted its focus to the convergence of culture and technology, as well as the convergence of culture, creativity and design with related industries. New development models are summarised as ‘culture + creativity’, ‘culture + technology’, ‘culture + finance’ and ‘culture + tourism’. This can be named as the ‘culture +’ model.
The development of cultural industries can follow two directions. One is the ‘internet +’ policy launched by Premier Li Keqiang in 2015, 20 in which the emphasis is in fact on the ‘+’, connecting traditional industries with internet-connected innovation, entrepreneurship and cooperative manufacturing in modern agriculture, smart energy, finance, public services, logistics, e-commerce, transportation, environment, and AI. 21 The key is to ‘apply internet intelligence to the real world’, which is exactly the mission of the maker movement. Furthermore, a new field of ‘digital creative industries’ has been brought to centre-stage. In December 2016, the State Council published a Guideline on Emerging Sectors of Strategic Importance During the 13th Five-year Plan Period (2016–20) (General Office of the State Council, 2015), which includes ‘digital creative industries’ among the network economy, advanced manufacturing, bio-economy and low-carbon sectors. The focus is on the convergence between digital technology, culture and creativity, and design, and the door handles include digital technology and equipment, digital content, design and cross-boundary cooperation. 22 It also intends to create a digital platform for innovation and entrepreneurship.
Another direction is manufacturing. This is connected to the global trend of regenerating manufacturing industry. While the UK and Germany are entering the era of ‘Industry 4.0’ (automation and integration of cyber-physical systems), 23 China also depicts its vision of becoming a strong manufacturing country in Made in China 2025. The route is the ‘mass innovation and entrepreneurship’ movement. In this aspect, it has created a policy release and interpretation platform on ‘mass innovation and entrepreneurship’ to provide a ‘one-station solution’ with a comprehensive collection of the policies and regulations. 24 Observing the categories of policies, we can see that support covers institutional innovation, favourable financial and tax support, increasing investment and service optimisation, platform construction, education and cooperation; and the objectives for support encompass R&D staff, graduates, migrant workers, retired military personnel, the unemployed, overseas returnees, and small and micro enterprises, and so on. Since 2015, the State Council has released over 30 policies in this field, and created a scene of top-down grassroots innovation. The ‘culture +’, ‘internet +’ and Made in China 2025 policies maintain an interactive conversation and are the paths for the ‘Chinese dream’, while ‘mass innovation and entrepreneurship’ is the inexhaustible driving force.
Transforming the paradigm of innovation: frugal social innovation
Creativity is often considered as the precondition or origin of innovation. In the field of creative industries, where individual creativity is the key element, innovation seems to be embedded. In cultural studies, innovation is more about ‘micro-productivity’, the prosumer, community and social learning: innovation from the margins. Furthermore, it is about the night-time economy, where scenes become the nodes of creative exchange, and thus a social production system (Currid, 2007).
Social learning is not only apparent in the creative sectors, but also in a wider social setting; not only in developed countries, but also in developing economies, with a tendency to focus on local needs, as for example with Jugaad, or ‘frugal innovation’. Taking 3M, Pepsi and P&G etc. as examples, Radjou and colleagues (2012) have brought the idea of Jugaad innovation to the world’s innovators. The six principles are: ‘looking for opportunities in an inferior status; using less for more; flexible thinking and action; keeping it simple; serving the clients; and listening to your heart’. A Jugaad country is envisioned, with a DIY revolution taking place through the rise of global frugal innovators. Meanwhile, Leadbeater (2014) generalises the concept of a frugal economy as one where a ‘creative community with a cause’ drives innovation.
Frugal innovation is evident in the maker scene, where people with ideas get access to the tools and start to provide a solution. It can be Embrace, the $200 infant incubators provided to hospitals in disadvantaged areas in India and South Africa. It can be the Fixperts projects, in which ‘fix experts’ provide solutions to the individuals in need. It can be the modes of product innovation passed on in the maker class in Shenzhen University, that is: break it down, combine two or more functions, or make it cheaper. And it can be part of a ‘general theory of thrift’ (Podkalicka and Potts, 2014).
This new culture of frugal, sharing enterprises may increase the tensions between copyright and open-source innovation. Though creative industries are based on copyright law, there are experiments like Creative Commons that solve the problems of sharing individual intellectual work. Digital publishing has also challenged the system of Intellectual Property (IP) rights. In contrast, open-source is the key to innovative practices in the maker movement. It does not call for the abolishment of IP law but encourages the owners of patents and copyrights to allow open access to technology, in order to generate further applications and more innovation, and eventually to reach towards the next industrial revolution.
Peter Drucker’s notion of ‘social innovation’ describes the momentum of turning social needs into business opportunities. That process is implemented not only by firms but also by social institutions, communities and citizens. This frugal social innovation might be a promising pathway for the maker movement to generate mass innovation and entrepreneurship.
Creative economy: a technological future?
A growing number of scholars are taking technology into account in their analysis of the creative economy. Hartley et al. (2015: 43–4) recognise that the rise of the creative industries is ‘taking place during a period of rapid technological change, with the emergence of the internet, digital media and social networks, globalisation of markets, and exciting new opportunities for users in creative innovation’. Digital innovation or technological disruption, brought about by robots, VR (virtual reality), drones and wearable devices, are also the new flavour of cultural studies, since here can be found pressing new questions of identity, meaning, relationships and even the limits of the human. Culture, technology and humanity are co-evolving.
A missing point in the above discussion of the relationship between the creative economy and maker culture is education. Since the establishment of the first Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, universities around the world have set up dedicated Creative Industries programs, in Business Schools or Schools of Art and Design, or even in Schools of History. Their aim is to foster comprehensively trained graduates with interdisciplinary agility, who are able to connect art with business, community activism with enterprise. In contrast, the maker movement is influential in primary and secondary education, although many universities have set up Fab Labs or makerspaces as the new lab experience for students of all disciplines. STEAM subjects are already the new trend in schools; the maker movement has promoted a focus on these subject areas. Along this road, programming might be the basic skill and the circuit board might be the basic equipment for future professionals. This is the radical evolution towards an age when digital literacy is a necessity for everyone, and innovation and entrepreneurship are a lifestyle.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research is supported by the National Social Science Fund China (2015–2018, 15CH167); by Guangdong Provincial ‘Twelfth Five-year’ Plan Programs on Philosophy and Social Science (2015–2017, GD14XYS19); and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (2016–2018, 71502114).