Hacking Manufacturing Jifei Ou, Jie Qi, Artem Dementyev, Ani Liu, Amos Golan, Daniel Oran, Donald Derek Haddad, Guillermo Bernal, Laya Anasu, Miguel Perez, Joe Paradiso, Hiroshi Ishii.

Hacking Manufacturing
The overall goal of our Hacking Manufacturing month was to explore how to do academic research on the factory floor. Specifically, we wanted to see new outcomes from using manufacturing machines to prototype, rather than traditional prototyping tools. Usually, when people go to a factory, they want to produce something that has been well-planned and has clear economic value. Instead, we wanted to bring the spirit of a lab to the factory: What if we could collaborate with its workers, directly prototyping and trying out ideas on the very machines that are used for production? What if curiosity were our only pressure point? As a manufacturing hub, Shenzhen is one of the world’s highest concentrations of factories across many industries. This ecosystem gave us access to diverse knowledge, tools, and raw materials. Benefits would flow—not only from new academic research for publication but also from bringing prototyping closer to production in the ideation phase.
8/1 – 8/28 2017, Shenzhen
Participants
Jifei Ou | Project Lead, Instructor | Tangible Media
Jie Qi | Instructor | Lifelong Kindergarten
Artem Dementyev | Instructor | Responsive Environment
Amos Golan | Student | Tangible Media
Ani Liu | Student | Design Fiction
Daniel Oran | Student | Synthetic Neurobiology
Donald Derek | Student | Responsive Environment
Guillermo Bernal | Student | Fluid Interfaces
Laya Anasu | Student | City Sciences
Miguel Perez | Student | Playful Systems
Sponsored by
MIT Media Lab, Hong Kong Design Trust
Factory Support
King Credie, K-Tech Textile