If I were to write an allegory of the computer manufacturing industry in "Greater China", I might be tempted to call it Pingguo and Shanzhai.

Pingguo（蘋果）is the nickname by which Apple Computer is known in China. Its partner Foxconn (a Taiwanese company by the way) is the largest electronic component manufacturer in the world and the largest private employer in the PRC. Foxconn is the pinnacle of industrial scale electronics manufacturing in the Pearl River Delta (and, indeed, the world); and Apple would not be the Apple of today without Foxconn, and China.

Shanzhai（山寨）are the noble bandits of our little allegory: small-scale black market manufacturers who skirt regulations and quality control to produce affordable, relatively low yield, but surprisingly diverse electronics. (I should point out that these innovations were enabled by another Taiwanese company, Mediatek, which sells development kits that many Shanzhai products, such as mobile phones, are built on top of.)

Pinguo and Shanzhai are the well-known protagonists in the technological and social drama of the computer manufacturing industry that straddles the Taiwan Strait. But neither Pinguo nor Shanzhai tell the story of the kind of technology that I want in my life, or that I want to base my business on.

For me the real inspirational story is that of Qi Hardware. Qi Hardware is innovation built not at the cost of billions of dollars and legions of anonymous workers (Pingguo), nor at the cost of questionable legal and safety practices (Shanzhai). Rather, Qi Hardware is a collective dedicated to sharing knowledge, experience and technology, and represents the kind of wise future[1] I am looking to achieve.

In discussing Qi Hardware I am constantly looking for a language to describe this new style of innovation. I am reluctant to call it 'open' hardware for reasons I have already explained; and calling it 'copyleft' hardware (in contrast to 'copyright') puts too much emphasis on the legal underpinning.

I finally settled on the term 'shared' hardware to describe what I feel captures the spirit of the movement. By sharing, Qi Hardware aim to lower barriers to innovation, as well as to profit and pump out genuinely cool technology!

Let's keep telling this story.

Notes

[1] wise futures - I came by this term by listening to public talks by Rob van Kranenburg and Adam Greenfield in Taipei in February of this year. You can read Part I here.

The first photo in this post is of the Milkymist One, which I shot in my studio a couple of weeks ago. The second photo is of Adam Wang, when I visited him in Taipei, where he tests and assembles the Milkymist.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to Academia Sinica in Taipei to address an audience of the Culturemondo forum on Smart Cultures, held alongside TELDAP and convened by Ilya Li. Ilya had asked me to prepare some remarks about open hardware culture, particularly as it relates to recent developments in Taiwan and China.

The Fabricatorz are often asked about "free and open" hardware. Jon shared his views on open hardware manufacturing during a talk he gave in Miami last December. It is not an idle topic for us, as we believe that investing in our own hardware platforms is just as important to the future of our business as is the software we create.

Can Hardware be Free?

The term 'open' hardware is used by way of analogy to free and open source software. The freedoms of 'free' software comprise the right to use, study, duplicate and improve that software. These freedoms as they relate to hardware apply not to the physical device itself, but rather to its design; for it is only the hardware design that can be truly studied, duplicated, and, most important, improved.

However, a process which begins with a free hardware design and ends with a finished product requires a non-trivial provision of capital, resources, skill, and time. This plain fact leads the founder of the free software movment, Richard Stallman, to conclude that "freedom to copy hardware is not as important, because copying hardware is hard to do."

I think the logic of that assessment is backward. The difficulty that hardware presents to our freedoms makes the issue more important, not less. It is the reason that we at Fabricatorz are investing time, money and talent to find solutions to the hardware dilemma. Recall the famous words of Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

Is Richard Stallman serious about software? I know we are.

Credits (images remixed by me on an M1):
Richard_Matthew_Stallman_working_on_his_Lemote_Machine
Alan_Kay_and_the_prototype_of_the_Dynabook

As my friends and colleagues can attest I carry a camera with me everywhere I go. I shoot film exclusively using a couple of mechanical rangefinders, which offer me needed reprieve from my otherwise relentlessly digital work-and-life-flow (I have my friend Joi Ito to thank for turning me onto rangefinder photography).

Sometimes new acquaintances are flustered by the cameras and the number of exposures I make, but understand my aims once they see the results.

Jon Phillips, Beijing (2012)

Xiaowu Wang, Beijing (2012)

Isaac Mao, Beijing (2012)


Sophie Chiang, Taipei (2011)


Bassel Safadi, Seoul (2010)


Pete Ippel, Brussels (2010)


Matt Hope, Beijing (2012)


Robin Peckham, Shanghai (2010)


Joi Ito, Seoul (2010)


John Haltiwanger, Amsterdam (2011)

In the early days of the New Year I travelled to Hong Kong to look in on our client and friend Robin Peckham, whose new gallery had just opened to not unexpected acclaim.

Saamlung manages to skirt both the geographical and curatorial boundaries of the established Hong Kong art scene. The space is perched on the top floor of a nondescript commercial building on Connaught Road (not far from the sightseeing Central galleries of Wyndham Street and Hollywood Road, but only if you discount the vertical dimension). At the same time, Saamlung's curatorial program hews between the heavyweight international galleries that care nothing for the city's local context, and the indigenous Hong Kong galleries that don't care to escape it.

When I visited the gallery with Sophie this January, we were lucky to catch Charles LaBelle's exhibition Corpus just before it closed. The work on display makes up part of Charles's life-long Buildings Entered project, and depicts a series of drawings of buildings with religious significance, atop pages excised from a copy of George Bataille's Je suis coupable.

Up now at Saamlung is a group exhibition, featuring work by a new favorite of mine, Chen Chien-jung.

Finally, don't miss this interview with Robin by CNN which gets it just right: Saamlung: showcasing Hong Kong's best new art.

We like to share. But what what does it mean to share data about our health?

All of us at Fabricatorz are well-practiced in the means and ways of sharing our creative output with everyone. Often this takes the form of selectively sharing certain rights to our creations, or even dedicating our work entirely to the public domain. We reason that our future interests (and yours!) are always better served by sharing what we do.

Sharing is one of the core principles that we wish to extend to greater aspects of our lives. However, there are certain domains of information where the legal and technological means of sharing are as yet ill-defined or non-existent.

One such domain concerns our health. Data about our health and genomics are the most intimate of personal details we can describe, and yet could prove to be the most useful thing we could ever choose to share about ourselves.

Anyone who has ever participated in a clinical study in the name of science has had to give consent to the researchers to use his or her data. However, there is as yet no easy way for that individual in the future to give any qualified researcher access to his or her data collected in the original study. This hampers your ability to share your own data, and consequently slows the progress of medical science itself.

A new project, Consent to Research, currently in a pilot phase, aims to remedy this problem by building a platform for gathering user-contributed data about health and genomics and sharing it with qualified research scientists. Consent to Research was conceived and is run by John Wilbanks.

Fabricatorz were contracted to build an alpha testing system as a proof of concept for the Consent to Research project (CtR). Our team has worked quickly and quietly to build and deploy CtR using Aiki Framework, and are proud to announce that the alpha site is live.

If you're interested in the future of open medical data science, or would just like to become an alpha tester, the new site is open and ready for testing at: consenttoresearch.us.