Not so idle speculation on shanzhai

After reading Tom Igoe’s “Idle speculation on the shan zhai and open fabrication” blog entry I’ve been trying to find some time to bring it to your attention. While Bunny Huang’s “Tech Trend: Shanzhai” blog post might be credited for bringing the details of what the shanzhai phenomena is all about and into the limelight, Tom’s piece looks at it in such a detailed way that I could never call it “idle”.


One of the important viewpoints on shanzhai business that Tom explores is “situated manufacturing” as he explains here in this excerpt from his entry:

A few years ago, Clay Shirky described an approach to software development that he dubbed situated software.  Watching the students at ITP, he noted how many of their ideas for software tools were developed quickly for a very specific community, and served that need well, but wouldn’t scale to a larger audience.  But perhaps scaling wasn’t necessary, he suggested, if software tools afford a quick, improvisational approach to development, and if the result serves the immediate need. Situated software isn’t enterprise software, it’s localized software.  Sometimes it’s based on ideas from enterprise software, and sometimes it’s an entirely different beast, but it’s always based on the immediate needs of a local group. Situated software is often built as web mashups. What open hardware companies and the shan zhai point to is a world of situated manufacturing: hardware and consumer goods that are developed in a similar fashion to situated software. The resulting products are sometimes sloppy, sometimes unfinished, but that’s okay, if they serve the immediate need.  They can always be improved in the next run, which is never more than a couple thousand units away.

Tom’s blog also goes on to describe the conditions necessary to create an environment where situated manufacturing and a collaborative work force can foster innovation. If you’re at all into the shanzhai phenomena “Idle speculation on the shan zhai and open fabrication” is a must read.

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