Shenzhen's Maker Carnival Turns Seven: Four Projects Worth Seeing

Compared with past years, makers' energy is fading.

In Shekou, Shenzhen, the Sea World Culture and Arts Center across from China Merchants Road drew a fresh wave of visitors last weekend. They had come for Maker Faire Shenzhen, a carnival for makers.

Maker Faire began as a gathering of makers organized by the American magazine Make in San Francisco in 2006, built around creative DIY. Regional editions followed all over the world, and Shenzhen won a license to host its own in 2011. Now in its seventh year here, this year's Maker Faire ran as part of the fourth Shenzhen Maker Week.

At Shenzhen Maker Week, most exhibitors are startups, and most of what they show is either already ready for mass production and the market or close to it. Maker Faire is a different thing: the exhibitors and their projects run to odd ideas, many of which leave you scratching your head.

Take the middle-aged Japanese man "wearing" a skeleton. His project was himself. He sent the skeleton "walking" ahead of him through the hall and the crowd, greeting everyone, sticking out its tongue now and then, posing for photos. He is a mechanical engineer by trade and built this "toy" purely out of an interest in the human skeleton. He told QDaily he had been bringing it to Maker Faire events for three or four years — in Shenzhen, in Japan, elsewhere — adding something new each time. This year it was the tongue.

Plenty of exhibitors had come from South Korea and Japan without English or Chinese. With no shared language and no interpreter along, they seemed to be there simply for the fun of it. Simp Team, from South Korea, is four people who have each invented a character for themselves; in their spare time they tinker with electronic DIY projects and review components, turn it into video, and post it on social platforms. Their main reason for coming to Shenzhen's Maker Faire was to get those videos more attention.

"Makers at Maker Faire are driven mostly by interest and hobby. They aren't hardware entrepreneurs in the usual sense, and productizing or finding a business model isn't where they start," Liu Dezhi, who plans Maker Faire in Shenzhen, told QDaily. That, he said, is what has confused the investors who over the past few years heard the word "maker" and turned up at Maker Faire — especially after the state pushed "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" in 2015 and drew more attention to the event, which is in fact a carnival for makers.

Talking to QDaily, Liu Dezhi described the confusion the hardware-maker label has caused, but he also granted that outside expectations of makers — or, put another way, the pull of capital — had won Maker Faire more government support, in venues and in money. Maker Faire Shenzhen started receiving government backing in 2015, and its events have grown steadily since. In 2017 it also won support from the Xi'an government and, outside Shenzhen, staged a maker carnival costing close to 10 million yuan — against a total of just 100,000 yuan for the first event in 2011.

Against that backdrop, the Shenzhen carnival has grown beyond a pure gathering of maker ideas to take in other kinds of exhibits, including those brought by startups. This year's theme was Co-making in the City. There were six zones in all; setting aside the ones for sponsors and entrepreneurs, only two were given over mainly to makers. Many of the rest centered on maker education, with projects aimed at children, and encouraged parents to come along with their kids and build something with their hands and heads together.

Here is some of what QDaily saw and heard at Maker Faire — though the zone I spent the most time in, and the one that stayed with me, was the makers' zone.

1. The Created Creatures Band

A piano built into an eagle, a guitar and a small drum making up an ant, a guitarist that is also a grasshopper, plus a Mickey Mouse and a bee. To be precise, this is an "instrument troupe" assembled from countless discarded electronic and mechanical objects. It stood right at the entrance of the Sea World Culture and Arts Center, playing the piano and drums by itself.

One of its lead creators, Li Ying, a Beijing man in his 50s, believes things should not be sorted into useful and useless, or given only one purpose. He reached that conclusion as he thought things over near retirement.

Li Ying used to run an auto repair shop, where the workshop was always piled with scrap. He is on the quiet side and likes working with his hands, so in his free time he tinkered with the shop's castoffs, assembling them into shapes: animals, Transformers, and more.

About two years ago he met Tian Li, who runs Seeek Lab, a studio that experiments with new-media installations. The two found common ground in installation work and decided to collaborate. Li Ying assembles and builds from discarded objects; Seeek Lab "brings the pieces to life" with technology.

The band at Shenzhen's Maker Faire is the result. Li Ying put his "musicians" together out of obsolete tape recorders, dead microphones, abandoned instruments, and Seeek Lab added the interactive technology that lets them make sound and play on their own. They are called the Created Creatures Band, and for now they can play four songs, each at a fairly gentle tempo rather than the loud rock we are used to.

The Created Creatures Band appeared for the first time this September at the Taobao Maker Festival; like a touring act, Shenzhen's Maker Faire was its second stop. Li Ying and his team say they will keep working up new songs, including faster ones for the "band" to play. Li Ying has now joined the team full time as a creator and handed the repair shop to a relative. Giving so-called waste a "new life" alongside his team, he says, makes him happy.

2. Urban "Implants" and the Interactive Wheat Field

These are actually two separate installations. But because they sat on either side of the staircase up to the second floor, and both have to do with plants, many people took them for one work shown two ways.

Urban "Implants" is seven curving, panel-like structures, arranged on site like seaweed. A motion sensor on the left picks up people coming close, and the structures respond by bending further or standing upright.

Explaining the piece on site, Liu Xiangyi, one of the founding team behind it, offered a comparison: a person walking up to the installation is the boss, and the structures are the subordinates — they see the boss coming and straighten up at once to greet him, and a few might need to bow 90 degrees in welcome. "The installation can do all that. Maybe it'd make a good gift for your boss," she joked.

Liu Xiangyi and her team come from E-LAB, which works on spatial art and architecture. Urban "Implants" was made to test what space can do. "A plant in nature reacts when you get close to it. City buildings, walls and spaces could change too, instead of staying fixed," Liu Xiangyi told QDaily.

Because the venue was tight, only one of the seven structures actually responded when visitors approached; the worry was that with a crowd, structures bending in different directions would be a safety hazard. But with only one moving, and moving only a little, most people standing in the marked sensor zone still could not tell what was going on unless a staff member explained it.

The Interactive Wheat Field is a "field" of close to a hundred wheat stalks, each rooted in a rockable, cup-shaped base, with data cables linking all the bases. Stand on the marked sensor spot and they begin to sway. The mechanism is much the same as Urban "Implants" above.

"It's like walking into a real wheat field — the wind blows through and the wheat ripples with it," Henry, who runs the installation, told QDaily.

The piece was designed by Deqing Sun and Peiqi Su, who wanted it to bring back a feeling that city life has taken away. Using technology to mimic nature, they hoped to give people in the concrete forest something fresh to sense. They chose wheat partly because it is a food grain, and stands for hope.

3. Clapping Robots

Round face, blank eyes, sausage mouth, hands held straight above the head, clapping in rhythm, the mouth opening and closing to make a sound in time with the claps. The first time you see these three clapping robots, your reaction may be: what on earth is this?

As the name says, this is a robot whose job is to clap, and while it claps it sings at a light, bright tempo. The three robots also have scripted dialogue. In the linked video they each shout "one, two, three," then start clapping and humming a tune; at the end one shouts "encore," and another says, "No, no, that's enough." They speak Japanese.

The Japanese robotics company Bye Bye World launched them at the Tokyo Toy Show this June. Through a companion phone app you can enter different lines — "welcome," "happy birthday" — and set different music, which makes them usable at all kinds of parties. At Maker Faire the three robots also had an extra sensor, so they could interact with the crowd, clapping along with anyone who clapped. Liu Dezhi's company, Makernet, is now the agent for the product's localized development, promotion and sales in China.

4. Last Year's Popular Projects, Back Again

The projects Maker Faire flagged as highlights — the living camera Touchy, the American surrealist cartoonist Steven Johnson, the tape work Tapigami, the co-created balloon maker art — all showed up last year at the maker carnival in Xi'an.

Liu Dezhi has helped plan Maker Faire Shenzhen since 2011. Asked how the event and Shenzhen's maker community have changed over these seven years, he pointed to what policy did in 2015. Hardware makers were red-hot then, and everyone in the market was talking about starting a company and about business models. "The maker spirit went bad," he said. After most hardware startups failed to find a way forward, the market cooled, and last year Maker Faire moved to Xi'an, which is farther from the startup world than Shenzhen; the standout projects there all asked visitors to do something with their hands.

And this year? As part of Shenzhen Maker Week, Maker Faire had only a little over 20 days to prepare — Liu Dezhi says six months is the right amount of time to organize an event. The rush produced more projects made just to meet the brief, fewer standouts, and less energy among the makers. "Maybe we ask too much of makers too soon. A technology takes time to develop, and makers need time too," Liu Dezhi said.

While waiting out that time, Liu Dezhi founded Makernet in early 2017, a company that works something like an agent for makers, handling how standout projects are packaged and promoted in China and digging out possible business. Five projects are its current focus: Maywa Denki, the clapping robots, the living camera Touchy, the American surrealist cartoonist Steven Johnson, and the tape work Tapigami. "This is Shenzhen, after all. Whatever production chain or supplier you can think of, you can find it here," Liu Dezhi said.

Cover image: "Co-Created Balloon Maker Art" / photographed by the author on site