You actually studied law, right? How did you get into the open hardware community in the first place?

I was working at an organization called Public Knowledge which is an NGO in Washington D.C. that works on technology policy — they focus on communications issues such as open internet and net neutrality, and also on copyright and other types of IP advocacy. There I did a lot of work on 3D printing. The 3D printing community, especially 5 or 6 years ago, and I would say still, is very closely tied to the open hardware world. And through the 3D printing community I got connected to the open hardware world. Then I got really interested in some of the questions around open source hardware and licensing. I have been engaged ever since.

When, in the role of a representative of Public Knowledge, you spoke to or speak to policymakers and Members of Congress, what is their main concern?

At this point the major issue is just an educational issue of giving them an understanding that open source hardware is a thing that people are doing and that it is something policymakers need to be aware of when they are crafting policy. I think it’s a really good concrete example of openness for them, an illustration of how you don’t always need a bunch of patents or IP protection to have a successful business or a successful hardware product.

You are really good at explaining the world of sharing to beginners and getting people excited about the definition of Open hardware licenses. Why do so many people still find it so difficult to understand its concept?

I think especially in the last 10 or 15 years there has been a real cultural education process about IP and ownership and this idea that everything has an owner and there is always IP involved. Getting people to get out of that mindset and think about a world where there is not necessarily a rights holder telling you what you can and cannot do, it just takes a little bit of adjustment for people. And so you have to kind of hold their hand a little bit and say: ‘Step back from the assumptions you usually use in your day to day life. Think about this for a minute and we can understand why this is different.’ But that path of understanding can be a little bit of a process.

Do you think that organizing stuff through commons will become more easy, popular and normal in the future?

Yes, I certainly hope so. I think that as more and more people do it, one of the things that happens is that is getting more popular, but another thing that happens is that you see the friction points and the things that are barriers. Not just to one or two people, but to a larger group of people. And then as a community we can identify those barriers and work to reduce the friction. And so over time we kind of tackle those barriers and make it easier to get involved.

Do you see it as a success that some big companies now have embraced open hardware?

Yes, I think that it is encouraging that at least conceptionally there are companies that are interested in it. I think one of the challenges right now in the open source hardware world is being a little bit more clear about definitions. Because it is easy to claim yourself as open source hardware. And I think that it’s important to make sure that if one person says ‘open source hardware’, the other person who is hearing that understands what that really means. And actually that’s what we are doing with the Open Source Hardware Association, trying to set up a certification process.

The purpose of certification is that if you are a user or consumer and you see something out there in the world that is marked as “Open Source Hardware Association certified” you know that it’s using a shared definition of what is open source hardware. They are not just saying open source hardware but actually are open source hardware.

It’s really an amazing achievement that after about 20 years of trying to find a definition, you succeeded in getting a common definition that’s accepted by all parties. That’s wonderful!

It was a lot of work by a lot of people that happened before I was really on the scene. Everyone who worked on that first definition deserves a lot of credit. It’s an incredible just organizational achievement to get everyone together and paying attention and engage at the same time.

What have you learned in this process, working in the open hardware community?

I think that there are a bunch of people who are really passionate with a diversity of views, and still a willingness to work towards shared goals. So you have to be aware of people’s different views, and make sure that there is space for it. At the same time once you have established a process, that in advance everyone feels is a fair process, at the end of that process, decisions have to be made. And as long as the process seems legitimate, I think people generally are ok with loosing an individual argument. If they feel like that they had a fair opportunity to have their views heard. And so the process is really important when trying to decide something. All the open source hardware certification stuff only matters if the community respects it and finds it meaningful. So you need to make sure from a legitimacy standpoint that you really have engaged the community.

So they feel ownership over the result?

I don’t know if ‘ownership’ is the right word. I know that a lot of people have given some time to help make the certification process work. And I feel a responsibility to bring it to fruition, because they have offered up their time to help. And so that means that they have entrusted the Open Source Hardware Association with this project and they said, we will engage with this, but you need to actually make something of it.

There is an Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance that’s related to you and that has four freedoms, to make a kind of label. Is this the same label that you are working on?

It’s a little bit different. The Open Hardware and Design Alliance is great and there was a lot of movement around it and I think one of the question there was, why did it not get more traction? I think one of the things that we are trying to do is to give a little bit more guidance as to what is required to use the label. And we hope that that increased amount of guidance can make it easier for people to confidently use the label.

Can you maybe also tell us a little bit about your work at Shapeways?

Sure I’m the lawyer at Shapeways. Shapeways is a 3D printing company. We are headquartered in New York, but we have got factories both in New York and in the Netherlands. And people interact with Shapeways generally in two ways. One is that they design something and they upload it on the site and we print it for them on one of our big fancy industrial printers, in one of 60 materials. Or they upload it to the site and they open up a shop and we will print it on demand and send it to costumers and send to the designers a markup. So as you can imagine, because we print a huge number of things, and we have designers doing all kinds of creative things there are a lot of legal questions floating around that I get to engage with.

Is it comparable to a publishing house for books, but for 3D printed things?

Yeah, in some ways it is. I think it is different in the sense that if you are an author and you want to have things published you submit your manuscript to the publisher and the publisher usually decides if they want to publish your stuff. We are much broader than that. Basically anyone can open a Shapeways account and anybody can upload stuff. And we do have some content policy restrictions, but generally speaking you can print a huge variety of things. And as long as you are not violating any of our rules you can open up your own shop at Shapeways and sell it.

And so we don’t have the same editorial control over who opens up a Shapeway shop in the way a publisher has a great deal of control over what authors they are going to publish.

So it’s a completely new business model in a way?

We are learning how to do a lot of things at once, because no one has had this international 3D printing manufacturing factory before, where anyone can come along and design something and immediately start selling it in 150 countries worldwide. There is a bunch of really interesting internal challenges in terms of making that system work efficiently. And then we are always working really closely with our community, to try and make sure that service and the system and the site are meeting their needs. It’s kind of a process of collaborative discovery. Because the community is discovering — as they do more of this — what they need and we discover what we can offer them. And so we work together to try to improve the site and make it work.

If you would close your eyes and imagine that it is the year 2025 already and you look back at the scene of the year 2016, what would you explain a person who was not there?

In terms of open source hardware I think what is happening right now is that the tools are finally starting to mature. The open source hardware community when it started, was kind of a relatively small group of people. They were all over the world, but they were very small. They knew each other if not personally then online, so there was this whole host of assumptions and understandings that were baked into the community that weren’t very well documented. And I think the process that we are in right now is formalizing those assumptions and understandings. So that when someone who is not already part of the community wants to engage they understand all of the rules and not just the written rules.

It must be hard identify what’s an informal rule.

Yes, you may have heard this too, but over the last couple of years I have certainly heard more than once someone saying — even if they are a relatively big company: ‘We were doing this thing, we wanted to make it open source hardware, we wanted to call it open source hardware, and we think that we are acting in good faith. But our fear is that we will mistakenly trip over an unwritten rule and make a lot of people mad at us. So maybe we will just stay away from open source hardware.’ I think one of the purpose of the certification is to say: ‘These are the rules, they are actually written rules, if you comply with these rules, then the Open Source Hardware Association will stand behind you and say: ‘Look, they followed the rules, everything is fine.’’ And hopefully that will make it easier for new people to get involved.

And you have got lawyers too?

Yes, Stanford University Law School’s Juelsgaard IP and Innovation Clinic is helping us and doing really great work, so when you use the certification you actually accept a license and a license spells out the terms of how it all works. So if you use the certification you are really agreeing to these rules.

Well we are very excited that you come to Vienna, will be great to meet you in person!

Can you give us a short introduction to your background?

Well, my personal background perhaps is not so much of an importance here but it is kind of tied to the company itself. The company has an R&D background, where me and my brother went out of university and founded ‘Antmicro’. We were joined by my father and his colleague to found a company that would deal with new technologies, basically. So at first there wasn’t any very concrete plan, but soon it grew into a company that was dealing quite a lot with open source, with applying new technologies to innovative use cases, finally people who want to be creative and challenging stuff are working there and do it. We provide development services for companies, their products, perhaps trying to demonstrate how their products are good and why they should be used. We are working a lot with semiconductor companies. So that’s the brief background of who we are.

Is it possible that there is an open hardware semi-conductor?

Of course it’s quite challenging looking historically at the industry how to match open source and profitability. Naturally it poses a lot of issues and questions and many people are afraid of it. You have to have a rational approach to it. Quite a lot of those companies of course live off the fact that they have some kind of technology that they know very well, that they want to sell. But there are growing areas generally in the technology industry, in particular in electronics, where things are already quite standardized, have become a commodity. Where it’s not really a threat to make them open, it’s not really a threat to a company’s business to release parts of what they are doing as open source, but you have to balance it. If you take one particular existing semiconductor and tell them, ‘Hey just go ahead and open source everything that you have,’ it’s not even just a psychological thing, quite obviously they would not be able to do it, because they would just lose any kind of competitive edge immediately. You would have to be prepared to do open source effectively, you have to know how to get profit from other things. It is possible, there is this RISC-V community, a community and organization and Antmicro is a founding member of it, which has built and is striving to popularise an open instruction set architecture for open source systems on chips, open source processors, in general open source chips. Which is interesting, because obviously the semiconductor industry used to be very closed and there have been many attempts to open things up a bit. But none so far has been extremely successful. RISC-V, I think, is much better positioned, because it’s a broad cooperation between many partners including Google, even some smaller semiconductors.

It was started at MIT?

No, it was started in Berkeley where the Berkeley license has originated. Also Berkeley is home of, well RISC, so it makes a lot of sense to have it start at Berkeley. Also Cambridge is involved, being the home of ARM and many other semiconductor companies, so it’s a pretty high profile initiative, I would say. And of course it will take a lot of time before it really catches on. But if you are asking me if an open semiconductor is possible I would say yes, because that’s exactly what is going to happen with RISC-V. And I don’t mean it as a threat to the semiconductors of today, I think of it more as an opportunity. Because the first ones to actually adopt at least partially this way of thinking, they first want to start integrating RISC-V to their designs, where they don’t have to pay royalties to anyone, where they just can do whatever they want. And they also don’t have to spend time supporting it, because quite simply RISC-V is supported by the community, so you get a tool chain and other things for free. You don’t have to keep an internal development team to work with it.

You are using RISC-V within the software for the appertus axiom camera?

We are using it in one place, yeah, of course as I said it will take time for RISC-V to catch on. And the problem is that most of the products being built today, the CPUs that we are using are so-called ‘hard cores’, in the silicon and not FPGA. The one that is implemented in the FPGA that we are using in the Axiom Gamma is actually RISC-V, because we thought, well, if we can use it why not? There have been tapeouts of real chips on RISC-V already, but no mainstream, large-scale tapeouts, where you just go to an online shop and buy a chip, which is necessary to build the camera. In the future I can imagine the camera being based on a RISC-V chip, fully, but today this is not possible. Where we need a so called “softcore”, that is implemented within the FPGA, there we use RISC-V obviously.

How did you get involved into the apertus community in the first place?

That was a funny story, we got an email from Sebastian Pichelhofer. I think more than two years ago. And he wrote to us that there is this camera project that they are doing, and if we would be interested in joining. That they had problems finding the right partners, commercial partners, to help them build it. And they asked if we would be interested because they saw our previous work in the open source domain. They knew that we are an open-source friendly company and I think there also was an agency that mentioned us to them. So they wrote to us and we said “of course we are very happy to collaborate on this.” And we met in Prague, which is half way between Poznan and Vienna, so it felt like a good compromise, to meet half way. I remember we had this network of offices that we could use, so we got one from there, not knowing if it will be alright. But it turned out to be a really nice place. We had this meeting there and the guys showed us the Axiom Alpha, the first iteration of the camera. It worked, so it was really cool to see, that what we thought was just a bunch of guys doing stuff, which still looked very impressive already then, the website, the community, it looked very nice, but to also see an actual, functional prototype, was really cool! Pretty much that was it. We knew that they meant business and we were happy to join the project. We were supposed to file this EU application at that time, so we also brought in another partner for this application, a German company called ‘af inventions’. And there already was a third partner called ‘denz’, that already was involved before and that is how Axiom Gamma was born. It was a very nice example of how those things can work in the ideal situation.

You are now as ‘Antmicro’ responsible for the software, the operating system? It’s running on Linux?

Yes, we also have an Android module, but the main stuff is running on Linux, yes.

So actually everyone can develop for the camera?

Yes, that’s exactly the plan to have it like that. It does of course require technical proficiency. It’s ‘anyone’ in the sense that there is not going to be any kind of prohibition. But of course if you want to build something for the camera you will need to know some things. It’s not so easy to make things accessible, we have been trying to do that as much as we can. But in some cases, for example, if you want to really modify the FPGA stuff, you will need to know FPGA development so that what you do makes sense. But the beauty of it is that you can learn, you can ask, you can do it if you want to.

And I guess you can also just upload the standard version again, if you make a mistake?

Yeah, that’s probably how most people are going to use the camera, using the standard stuff that’s delivered. But the good thing is with open source, that you know how things work and you know what’s going on, that’s the basic thing that you get out of it. But then there is the portion of the community of course that wants to contribute things and they can. Also one part will be just to build additional modules, to not really modify the core of the camera, but the camera itself has this modular structure where you can put in another module of your own design. That is pretty neat, because then you can take full responsibility of what you are doing and build the module in any way you want as long as you comply to some kind of an interface. In this way it’s also easy to collaborate, because people might start offering different modules, even sell them for money. Because you have to live off something, so if people find some businesses around the Axiom Camera that’s also great.

The license allows that, that you sell it?

If you build your own module then you have made it. If you have a camera that has a modular structure and you just push the module and connect it to the camera, I don’t think there is any kind of license even that would make it impossible to do that, to sell that, the hardware itself. If you build your own modules then you can license them however you want, you are allowed to. But that’s sort of on the periphery. Anyway the camera itself is going to be Open Source.

You are one of the founding fathers of Arduino, the most famous prototyping platform in the world. This project has grown enormously big, what are today your main concerns regarding Arduino’s future?

I think my major concerns about Arduino’s future at this point are the same one’s they always are, whether we can continue to survive, whether we can continue to bring in the money needed to keep employees employed, in order to keep working on the project, and expanding it.

You know, I think those things don’t really change over time. You are always trying to keep up with what ever else is going on in the field and nowadays…you know when Arduino started there wasn’t anything really out there for beginners to prototype on. Now there is a whole lot of other things. Which is great, I’m very glad to see that. I think now the question is, does Arduino continue to be the best thing? And if not, what else replaces it, what comes along now, what do we need now opposed to what did we need ten years ago?

This brings me to my next question: Until now most companies have not opened up some of their core chip designs. Will the ATMEL chip on the Arduino board ever be an open hardware, you think?

I imagine it will happen at some point. There is a project out right now, I’m forgetting the name of it[Tom edit- I was thinking of http://www.pulp-platform.org/ which is actually an open source RISC core design], that’s doing an open FPGA design. And it’s still very nascent, but I think it will happen eventually. One of the things though I think is worth keeping in mind is that I don’t think we will ever see a world that is a hundred percent open source. I’m not even sure that would be a good thing necessarily. There is always a spectrum from closed to open. And I think that those various levels along the way feed each other. One of the things I think we are learning working with Intel for example, is — Intel not very much known for their open source work but known for some really great work in terms of chip design — are now recognizing the value of open source hardware as well as open source software. They had done a lot of great open source software — openCV came out of there for example. Now they are starting to see the need for hardware. And I think the questions they ask are often really valuable, pragmatic ones, that we as smaller companies don’t recognize as much. Around… what is the value of the work being open besides just learning from it? Is there something that our vendors can gain from it? Is there something our customers can gain from it being open? These are things we always have to try and figure out how to answer.

In your lecture at the last open hardware summit 2015 you encouraged a closer collaboration between open source hardware developers and the private industry, as you mentioned before, in order to reach a wider public with open source projects, as far as I understood you. Wouldn’t that compromise to a point the open hardware principles? To have a too closed collaboration?

I don’t think so necessarily. I think that open source is a political stance. And any political stance is useless unless its in dialogue with other political positions.

I think if you are in a world where there is only one political position we have a word for that, right? It’s called fascism. And whether you are doing it from the extreme left or the extreme right or the extreme top or the extreme bottom you are always in dialogue with these other positions.

So I think that, I tend to see open source as an ideal to move towards. And in every given project its a matter of asking: what are the elements that we would benefit the most from opening up? We’ve seen that for example in a lot of the internet protocols, because not everything is open on the internet, but many of the communication protocols are, and that has allowed us to make a whole lot of different interoperable tools. That’s great. I think when you can operate at that level to identify what are things that allow for interoperability, that’s where the most value of open source is.

You have been teaching a lot on the internet of things and networked objects, right?

Does understanding the functionality of networked objects and communication between things help to understand more about political surveillance and maybe give back agency to people?

Oh I think so absolutely, yeah. Well whetherwhether it gives back agency is a second question. It certainly does help to understand surveillance and all the aspects of it more. I think for example the work that Surya Mattu has been doing around wireless is really great on that regard. He has being doing a lot of work around explaining in every day terms, how ethernet and wifi protocols work so that people can understand how some of what is built into these network protocols isn’t even necessarily about surveillance, it’s about needing to exchange information in order to identify each other in order to start a conversation. And how the side effect of that is: surveillance. To put it simply: The fact that you and I have a conversation — we have to identify each other first and we have to identify a common language to speak. And if we are doing that in public, someone can surveil us by virtue of the fact that we have made these choices. The internet is the same way in my opinion.[tom edit — the primary condition of participating in a network is that of vulnerability. We have to accept that by choosing to participate in any network, we leave ourselves vulnerable to the actions of others within that network] And I think once we understand what that means in any given conversation we make wiser choices about what we choose to reveal or don’t reveal, knowing that we are in public. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. In a recent article on Make Magazine you advocate that everyone should actually learn how to program, as a form of personal expression, and as well to develop computational thinking. How would it change the culture scene for example of New York, if all inhabitants would know how to code? And understand these systems?

I think it’s changing already. I think even though people don’t necessarily know how to program well more and more people understand how programming works. Even people who say, use macros in a spreadsheet, or use mail merge in a word processing program. They are thinking computationally. They may not be thinking in C++ or Java or things like that, but they are thinking like programmers. And I think that’s the kind of thing that changes the way we relate to the tools we use and changes how we use them. We have a greater understanding what they are capable of and what their limits are and so we spend less time being frustrated and sometimes we also come up with new uses for them as a result.

Talking being frustrated: A lot of people work now in open hardware teams and run into some kind of rather social problems. You are a team member of Arduino. Committing a lot of free time and investing a lot resources into this shared project. Which challenges did you run into, on a personal level working in such a team?

Oh the challenges we run into are the same ones everybody else does. Ultimately when you are working on an open source project there is a certain amount of what you are doing that you are giving away for free. So as a result you have got to find something else that will allow you to pay the rent. In my case, as you know, I pay the rent by working at ITP [Tom edit- I do more than pay the rent. Working at ITP is my choice, because I love teaching there. Though I enjoy working on Arduino, it will only ever be a part of what I can do compared to teaching]. The work I do on Arduino is all free, basically. Even though I own part of the company I don’t take a salary from the company.

Wow.

And that has changed how I relate to the company. I have started to put borders around what I will do and what I won’t do, now that we have employees. And my partners are ok with that, but we have to discuss it every time. Because I cannot just start doing something and then say yep, I’m not doing that. And we do discuss it as we go. The same has been true with of my partners. Dave Mellis for example, went on to do a PhD at MIT and some of the time he was available, some of the time he wasn’t. Whereas Massimo and David Cuartielles, because they chose to work on it full time [Tom edit- and they have had more involvement as a result. I share my opinions with them, but I defer to their decisions, because they have chosen to commit more of their involvement than I have]. So I think that’s a big one, is recognizing that in almost any open source project people have outside projects, or side projects or day jobs. And you have to discuss what your borders are and what you are capable of contributing to the project and what you are capable of not.

My last question …sorry my questions are not really related.

It’s ok.

My last question would be that many people agree that making has become an educational tool. Yet one that it is not completely free of a certain form of neoliberal ideology as well, encouraging kind of..entrepreneurship and start-up mentality. Do you think this could be problematic for example in the context of China, where there are really big makerspaces now for thousands of people?

….I need to unpack this a little bit. First of all, yes I agree there are certain problems within the context how you framed it. But I don’t think making has to be framed in terms of entrepreneurship. The fact that it is now is a result of the sort of cultural political climate we live in. Me personally, I prefer to think of it more separated from that. I don’t think that you have to make a business out of anything. But at the same time I recognize that there is a certain level of affluence and privilege necessary to be able to have that freedom. In other words, I have the ability to make recreationally, because I support myself in other ways. For someone who has no better means, making might become a more entrepreneurial effort because of that. And I think I’ve seen some of this in China. I’ve seen many young people, for example, who see the maker culture as a way to move away from the alternatives: maybe to move out of the factories, or to move out of other things like that. So I think that you are always going to see see some [Tom edit- differing motivations for making — some more recreational and some more entrepreneurial] as a result of that and you will always gonna see some debate about it. And I think its something that in each case you will have to discuss it case by case to say, is that a problem or is that an opportunity. Does that make sense?

Yes, completely, completely.

Well, I’m at the end of question-list. Is there anything you would like to add? Or say to the people who are gonna read the booklet that is going to be spread at the open hardware summit?

This is for the one coming up now, right?

Yes, in May.

Yeah, I think your questions hit most of the things that are important. I guess the main thing I would add, the two main things I would add is:

Number one, when we start to talk about networks and communication tools like we have been doing, we have to recognize that vulnerability is a central condition of that. That everything we do on a network makes us vulnerable. It also gives us the opportunity for communication and those two things can’t be separated. So I think we need to recognize this as part of the world we live in now. And I think, you know, a lot of the stuff that Snowden has done — post exile — in a sense, has really indicated that. A lot of his talks have been really around this idea, that it doesn’t matter how secure you think you are, you are never one hundred percent secure. But at the same time you are getting these great opportunities with the system that are worth sometimes this vulnerability and it’s your job to decide how much vulnerability is it worth. So that’s point number one.

I think point number two for me is that everything we are doing in this space is always with someone else or for someone else. You are never working alone. As a result, everything we do has to be discussed. With those whom it’s for and with those who it’s with. In order to decide whether its worthwhile or not. We should not assume that something we make is good for others without discussing it with them.

Thank you so much, Tom Igoe, it was really, really great to talk to you. Thank you so much for committing your time, I really appreciate it.

It was great to see you again I look forward to see what comes out.

How has your project of working on medical tools that are Open Hardware evolved or changed in the last year?

So in the past year what we have done is, we have migrated the project from being a labour of love — something that we were just trying to think through and to work through — into something that is truly systemic and embedded in our own academic institutions here.

Exactly a year ago the step that we were at was that we had a prototype stethoscope. We had no testing yet done for it, but a good idea that it would work. And in the past year what we have been able to achieve is to create a production line in the Gaza strip. We’ve got from one printer up to ten printers in the Gaza strip. Which are distributed among some health centers, prothesis center etc.., We have now lined up and sorted out the logistics so that we can move forward in terms of testing and clinically validating more equipment and more devices. Whereas we had the stethoscope last year, now there is also this thing called a ‘pulse oximeter’ and it looks really good for an electrocardiogram next year. And actually we are trying to collaborate with mobilECG. They have made a really excellent, tiny open source electrocardiogram. But we just wanted one that is easier to make, so we are trying to refine the design, so that it is easier to construct in a low resource setting instead of depending on a factory to make them.

So how do you get these tools into Gaza?

Well, you make everything locally, that’s the key. You can make a 3D printers in Gaza using old photo copiers, so you have the stepper motors, using local recipe creation (???), using parts that are salvaged. Of course there are a view things that have to be there, for example, until now the chip that goes into the Arduino isn’t something that can be manufactured locally, must be brought in from outside. And it also can’t be sourced from other devices. So there are a view items that you can’t make. But in the Gaza strip from the beginning the key has been to domesticate and make indigenous the creation. Not just because it’s cheaper, just because it makes it actually possible. It’s literally impossible to create these things outside and ship them inside right now. Not just for that though. The other thing that we really want is to empower people there to create solutions that work there. I can tell you an example. It is more or less unthinkable here to have a hospital without power 24/7. So there is no real critical care system here that has a battery backup built into it. With the pulse oximeter we focused on low power consumption so that it can run for days on a few double A batteries. These are the sort of things that we are trying to do. We are trying not just to make it so they make copies of our equipment, but also that they are thinking ‘What do we want, what do we need?’ and make it for themselves.

You also helped to install solar panels on one of the roofs of the hospital, right?

Yes! The solar panel project is a separate project with a separate group of people. It’s a response to the fact that many times working there…you know …I was working for example doing a very delicate procedure on a patient. A patient who maybe was now unconscious and on life support or a patient where we needed to do something right now. And of course the moments were you need to do things on very sick patients tend to be the moments were electricity is most unstable. So one thing we wanted to do is, we wanted to change the equation. What is the response to power insecurity? It’s domestic diesel generators, so every hospital has diesel generators, every house, every institution. One thing we wanted to do is to clean the air as it were, reduce the costs and make the electricity 100 percent reliable. In the Gaza strip it gets 300 sunny days a year, in which you can fully charge systems.

Are there organizations like doctors without borders who support you or is it mostly the hacker community now that is supporting you?

Well, it depends. What the hacker community did was, it planted the seed. And I think this is what the hacker community does best. For example, we couldn’t have talked about popular encryption if not Moxie Marlinspike hadn’t done something about the problem so that people could have a possible solution. Or if people behind Tor wouldn’t have made Tor, you couldn’t go out to the institutions and say ‘Hey, I have this idea, let’s make things like an onion and route all around the world’. In the Hacker community we try to be visionary. We try to look 50 years down the line and ask what should the world look like? What does privacy mean for a free society? What does independency mean? In this case the question is not privacy, it’s independence. What we ask is, what does independence mean to society? And once we have that principle then we start creating tools that allow other organizations to come in and other organizations to see. Because almost all established organizations want to see results on the ground. The international community of the red cross is getting involved now in the prothetic work. If you would have gone to them in the beginning and said ‘Oh, we are going to make 3D printers out of photo copiers and you know it’s a 3D printer that makes plastic objects out of nothing!’ Nobody would have even understood what you are talking about. So when we first went to the artificial limb center, we went to the prosthetists, we showed it to them, we said, ‘Can you use this? What does this mean to you and would you want to?’ Because at the end of the day also it is about giving people tools, not forcing solutions down people’s throats. And so the prosthetic that we brought, it failed spectacular, didn’t work, nobody liked it. The things that work pretty well in Canada don’t work well in Gaza. If what we have brought was a prosthetic, the project would have already been done. But what we brought was a 3D printer. So what they did was: ‘We want to change it like this, we want to print it like this, we want to design it like this!’ So they designed the solution that they thought would work. They were able to test it. By the way it also didn’t work. And so they went back and designed another one. And so we started all this work in August last year, we are now 9 month and we have already been through three major revisions of prototypes and we finally hit upon one that they loved, that patients seemed to like, that we like, that works well.

Who is doing this development work? Is it doctors inside or who is it you are working with in Gaza?

In this case prosthetists, people who specialize in making prosthetics. And it’s a joint project between the Gaza municipality. Can you believe that prosthetics are a municipal service in Gaza?

That’s quiet nice.

That’s fucked up! Garbage should be a municipal service, not prosthesis because of war! It’s fucked up!

I thought that this way everyone can access it, so that it’s not a private insurance that you need to get a prosthesis, I thought this is public?

You are right, this is a great side effect. But it’s fucked up that it’s a municipal service! It’s crazy! Anyway! I have never heard of this anywhere else, I’ve never heard of a municipal service that had to be designed for war amputees, that is fucking crazy, it should be a ministry service.

That of course is insane. How do people keep up hope in Gaza? I mean, there has been so much destruction and violence again and again. How can you get people into believing into something like this?

You know, when I went to the hospital in London, Ontario, in Canada, people laughed at me and kind of kicked me out. I came back later and it worked better over time, but it took a long time. In the Gaza strip the first time I showed a 3D printer to a doctor they said ‘Holy shit, what can we do with this!’ You know we are the once who are trained to be hopeless. We are the ones who look around us in despair. They are the ones who have been surviving through sick and thin through decades. And so it’s the opposite — I didn’t bring hope to them, the brought hope to me! They were the ones who gave me hope. And they were the ones whenever I felt down..you know..I’m talking to you from Canada right now, why? Because I wasn’t allowed to enter. I was going on the plane and they cancelled my entry acceptance. And were fucking around with the logistics. They gave another entry acceptance on Fridays, the conference ends on Thursday. So I went home and I was very upset. I thought ‘Oh my god, what can we do now? All these people have been cancelled, they can’t go’. And I called my friends and I told them ‘You know, I’m very upset, and this is what happened.’ And they said ‘You know, this is Gaza. And if there are problems we find solutions for them’. And the are the ones who kept hope and said ‘You come or you don’t come — we are having this conference. Doesn’t matter, just skype in!’ So we just skype in!

Do they have internet at all?

Yeah, internet is very good there.

How do you deal with people who want to stop you from your activism or stop you like this time, when they cancelled your entry visa?

Well, I don’t worry about them, I don’t think about them, I don’t let them take me down, except maybe very, very temporarily. When I confront them directly there are a few instances, in which there are individuals who are stopping me. I tell them ‘In 30 years you will be ashamed to tell your grandkids what you did, and I will be proud of what happened today.’ And that’s true. Most of them don’t have that perspective. You know, Stefanie, that you are going to care about freedom or privacy or human rights in 30 years. Well, I know that too about myself. And when you know that you have 30 years to get things done — I’m now 35, so let’s say I have another 30 years — you can be very patient. You can be very patient and it outlasts their understanding(???).

Well, that’s a really good perspective. That gives more resources, at least time resources! To keep up a struggle.

Exactly! When I was born the USSR was fully strong, America looked completely unstoppable, Latin America was in shambles and mostly still occupied, you know? Egypt was under dictatorship and South Korea was still under dictatorship. And of course the Arab spring hadn’t yet happened. The world changes. And all I want is to make sure that the fuel for the correct fire exists the next time there is a spark.

I think this is a good end for the interview, because unfortunately we are already at 14 minutes. But is there one last thing that you would like people to know about your work, who come to the open hardware summit?

Yes, the one thing I want you to know is that we have to think with goals and long term perspectives. So the goal here is not 3D printing, the goal here is independence of medical devices. And the goal of that is better health. And all of the means seem trivial if they are blocked. For example, before we did 3D printers, they were importing stuff through the tunnels, before the tunnels they were bribing corrupt Egyptians to let life saving medical equipment in. What’s the goal? The goal wasn’t to build tunnels or to build 3D printers, the goal was to make people healthier. And I think for the people at the conference, so long as they grab onto that, these higher order goals, and keep up hope and work hard, then they will be able to make a difference.

Hello Professor Silvia Lindtner, thank you for your time and commitment to have this conversation with me. I would like to go right to the frst question. The Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance — which is an international organization — has formulated 4 freedoms with which they want to label Open Source Hardware as Open Source Hardware. These are 4 freedoms:

Freedom 0: The freedom to use the device for any purpose.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the device works and change it to make it to do what you wish. Access to the complete design is precondition to this.
Freedom 2: Redistribute the device and/or design (remanufacture).
Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the device and/or design, and release your improvements (and modifed versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefts. Access to the complete design is precondition to this.

Could the implementation of such a label for Open Source Hardware become popular in China, specially in cities as Shenzhen?

So I think my answer to that is gonna be both of perhaps, long and short. Ok, let’s start by saying that: when we think about the importance of Open Source Hardware and why people — you know — think of it as a countercultural movement, as an intervention into how we produce technology today and also how we consume technology today, we also have to see how that particular articulation as we see it for example in the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance — an articulation of what Open Source Hardware means — is very culturally situated.

So when we look at this articulation of 4 freedoms — which means unlimited and unconditional — at least when you look at the website, right? There are notions of — There is the freedom to use the device for any purpose. The freedom to study how the device works and change — change it to make it to do what you wish. Redistribute the device and/or design. Remanufacture it. And the freedom to improve the device.

Now why is that so important, in let’s say, the United States or in Europe? That is so important because it has become really difcult to do that here. And this is again as I said earlier culturally and historically situated.
So if you think back about an era when that actually was possible to do, that was industrial production era, in the United States and in Europe. That was an era when manufacturing was part and parcel of how the modern Western society developed. So much of that — sort of both the ability and freedom to make anything you want and decide how its being used — that has drastically transformed and in part this was shaped by outsourcing, by cooperations that have developed brands, which then have created design principles that structure and organize user participation in a particular kind of way.

So when you think about the Open Source Hardware movement in the West it is very much an intervention in that: it’s saying, well, we have actually lost the ability to easily make and hack things based on what we want them to be. That is not just because the West has outsourced manufacturing, but also because we are now living in a “creative or knowledge economy” where people consume both digital and other types of goods and people have become fairly passive consumers. Rather than active producers. So the question about — does something like this exist in China — has to be understood in relationship to China’s own particular context and history of production.

In China today there is still a lot of manufacturing, although a lot of this is currently also transforming, China is still one of the largest producers of our electronic goods. So actually this notion of bringing back making and manufacturing and enabling people to make or to manufacture is not a big desire, because many people still make a living of of manufacturing and of hacking things open, opening them up and recycling components out of old and discarded devices. That’s part and parcel of a vast manufacturing ecosystem that exists mostly in the South of China but also in other parts of China. In some ways Open Source Hardware in China means both something similar and different. It’s not really an intervention in enabling many people to produce, because many people in China still produce. And at the same time you see an Open Source and Maker movement that has evolved in China since roughly 2008. But the desires and the kind of unique counterculture that has moved in China needs to be understood in relationship to China’s own culture and history of continued manufacturing there.

And so just to give you a sort of more specific example, when we think about Open Source Hardware and what it means in the West, or when we look at the website of the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance, its very much so this idea that production should be democratized, its an individual right that anyone should have to make their own device according to their own ideals. To also have the right to hack a device that they get from somebody else perhaps. So when you look at manufacturing in China or what has evolved over the last 30 years is an Open Source production culture that is both in some ways very similar and then also in many ways different from this notion of Open Source Hardware production in the West.

Most people think of manufacturing in the South of China through companies such as Foxconn, that produces for Apple… so people think of very large scale manufacturing industries that mass-produce for for example Western cooperations. But what very view people know about though is that over the last 20 years there emerged another informal economy of production in Shenzhen, in the South of China. You can think of it as a kind of entrepreneurial effort that started to develop in the gaps of the global economy, in the shadows of large contract manufacturing. These were factories that in the beginning were largely family owned — that have moved from Hong Kong to Shenzhen — which is really just a subway ride away, and they were in the 70s mostly producing retail goods and these were largely copycat goods. For example the copycat Gucci bag or the copycat Nike shoe. And they saw an opportunity emerge as electronics manufacturing had moved to Shenzhen. So it was part of the outsourcing boom in the United States and in Europe, most of the industrial production had moved to parts of Asia and the South of China in particular. So they saw and opportunity to say, well we produced copycat retail for niche markets, so for people who couldn’t afford the expensive Gucci bag. They produced copycats which then would go for example and be bought by the migrant worker, to people — again — who could not afford the more expensive product.

So they started partnering and working together, these were in the beginning really small scale entities, family owned businesses that started collaborating and produce mobile phones for niche markets. So these were mobile phones for migrant workers — again, people who could maybe not afford the expensive iPhone would then be able to afford a cheaper device — perhaps more low end — but still serving a particular kind of need.

Now this industry has scaled quiet rapidly in about ten years and is now producing smart phones for niche markets outside of China. At the beginning it started out by producing phones for migrant workers in China and now a lot of these phones are being sold in Africa, in India, in Latin America and so on. It is now actually a multi billion dollar industry, people make a lot of money with this. Its not anymore just small scale entrepreneurs — its actually a big network of many manufacturers.

You might wonder then, how was this possible? How was it possible for these at the beginning really small scale factories to actually compete with big international cooperations like Nokia and Apple? And actually tap into entirely new markets? So what they did, and this is sort of what I have been following in my research in Shenzhen over the last three years, is to understand what made that possible. And what made it possible is an Open Source production principle applied to manufacturing. So basically what is at the heart of this Open Source production culture is a board. It’s a physical board, also called a reference board in manufacturing, which you could compare to kind of an upscale Arduino board, but applied to manufacturing. The board itself is completely open. It comes with an “Open bill of materials”, which is a list of materials with all the components that go into producing a device. For example the Apple iPhone comes with its own bill of materials or the Samsung smart phone comes with its own bill of materials. So the bill of materials for this reference board that goes into producing — let’s say — a smart watch or a mobile phone is completely open and shared amongst hundreds of factories, in the Perl River Delta in the South of China around the city of Shenzhen. And by openly sharing these reference boards entrepreneurs factories, factories that have an entrepreneurial spirit in the South of China can very quickly bring products to the market.

Think about how you work with the Arduino: you basically go online, you see what other people do with the board, you learn by looking at what other people do with the board, you build on top of existing practices and experiences, right? You might modify a lot of things and over time you might build completely new things, right? The same is true with that board, so people basically could take one of these reference boards and not modify anything and just attach a unique shell to it, that makes it look like a very unique phone, but comes with a fairly standard capability. But you could for example sell that phone uniquely designed on the outside for a new market, let’s say somewhere in France. But you could also make slight modifcations to the board, which is very easy to do, because, again, it is openly shared. So you might just attach a new component to it or change some of the components and then again create a unique shell to it and tap into a completely diferent market. This Open Source Culture applied to manufacturing has allowed companies — and these are factories — to produce fairly quickly. It’s a kind of agile manufacturing process that thrives through an Open Source sharing mentality. And so products like a new mobile phone can go from an idea to production in very short periods of time, so sometimes you can take an idea to market within only 30 days. That would not have been possible if it wasn’t for the manufacturing culture that has emerged in the South of China in the last 30 years.

So when we talk about Open Source Hardware and Open Source manufacturing in China we have to understand that particular history of production in China. And in that sense as I said earlier its both similar and different from this notion of Open Source Hardware in the West, because there is a kind of notion to never build from scratch, to build on each other’s work, to share openly, to re-distribute and re-manufacture, so a big integral component of Shenzhen is that a lot of broken and discarded devices come back to Shenzhen.

So what factories also do there is that they open them up and take out the components that are still usable and then use these still working components and put them into new devices. So there is a kind of re-use and re-cycle infrastructure that is built into this open manufacturing ecosystem. And so again, the ethos in that sense is very similar, because it’s also about re-use and re-cycle, but it’s driven less so by a countercultural spirit, as it is the case for example with the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance. Its less opposition, as an intervention in consumer culture and passive consumer cultures as I said in the beginning. But it’s a “making do” mentality, it’s a kind of Open Source spirit that is driven by necessity. So a lot of these early entrepreneurs in the South of China they themselves were migrants, they tried to make a better living, for their own families, so the Open Source practice came out of a desire or need to collaborate in order to actually compete with larger players on the market and to make a better living.

So the Open Source Hardware revolution has happened there already long time ago? It’s not necessary?

Yes, that’s a good way of putting it, yes. And you know it’s interesting too, because a lot of that is changing right now. So just to give you a little bit of a sense of what is going on in China with regards to making and Open Hardware:

So the Chinese government since 2015 has strongly endorsed making. The Chinese Vice Prime Minister Li Keqiang in January 2015 visited the local hackerspace in Shenzhen. So the same city I was just talking about in the South of China. And he was super excited about what he saw there. He celebrated this particular hackerspace called Chaihuo as a place for entrepreneurial creativity and for new innovation. And he went back to Peking and declared a new national policy that postulates making and Open Hardware as a new approach towards entrepreneurship and innovation in China.

And there are no patents on no level of this development? There is no point where they licence their products? It’s always completely open?

You mean in the hackerspaces?

For example, if they make a new shell with Open Source Hardware, the whole thing is still open, right? Maybe it’s not a very relevant question. But…there is no patenting, no licensing on any level, right?

Exactly. Well,…so what I was trying to get at with Li Keqiang is that a lot of this is changing though. So what has happened historically — and this was really sort of at the height of this manufacturing, it was at it’s height in 2008 — but…so what happened is that we could call them white labelling products. So they didn’t come with a brand, there were no patents, and you could buy them not just in the markets in China, but also at WallMart for example in the United States. But they would be sold as a particular kind of brand in the United States or in Europe or in Africa now. But the company in Africa or in the West would just attach a label onto the device even though it’s completely designed and manufactured in China. But in that sense there is no infrastructure like the patent system that’s put in place during the production process.

But I was bringing up Li Keqiang, and this new policy, because a lot of this is changing. This open source manufacturing culture is considered now as something bad, something that China has to overcome. Something that is backwards, because it’s associated with copycat. So what the Chinese government is now saying is that Shenzhen should

become more like the Silicon Valley in the United States, should become more like the hackerspace in the West. And actually write patents and have their companies go IPO, develop brands in order to develop proft margins. So there is now a looking towards the West to apply these sort of models of open hardware and Silicon Valley type kind of innovation culture in order to make what is happening in China look more international, look more globalized, make it look like “yes, this is legitimate design and innovation work”. And what is happening in the process is that a lot of this very creative Open Source Hardware production culture is basically disappearing and is being de-legitimized.

This is terrible, it’s so sad! And what is happening to the hackerspaces?

Alright, so with that new policy that went into place in January, the policy was called — if you translate it directly into English — ‘mass makerspace initiative’. And you could also translate it into ‘mass innovation’ or ‘mass entrepreneurship’. And what has happened since is that the government has made a lot of money available for all kinds of people to build up makerspaces. So you now see.. within just a couple of months…China suddenly moved from only sort of like 40 makerspaces into thousands of makerspaces. So you now have factories that have makerspaces, libraries that have makerspaces, highschools that have makerspaces and everyone now is building a makerspace/hackerspace, because that’s now where funding is made available. And again it’s that vision to say, well, if we have makerspaces then we can train people in a kind of entrepreneurial attitude that they need to develop in order to keep our economy going.

Is it educational sites that also impose an ideology on citizens?

Yes, very much so, because the Chinese economy — you might have read this on the news — has experienced extreme dramatic increase ever since China opened up, but then has slowed, so the dramatic economic growth has significantly slowed over the last years. And so there is of course anxiety about where the jobs are gonna be and how can we also avoid social uprising, if people are dissatisfied and are unemployed, you know? So makerspaces are now seen as kind of incubator programs — you might say — to cultivate entrepreneurial citizenship in some way. Where people learn how to become entrepreneurs through hands-on making, open source hardware tinkering. And that’s considered the way to go for the future of China. And again, this is not unique in China, the Obama-administration is doing something very similar — European Union is doing something very similar. This is really a much more global phenomenon where you see governments in Europe, in the United States, in China, in other parts of Asia and in other parts of the world making an argument for how hardware tinkering and making can be a particular fruitful approach to training people to become entrepreneurs. It’s really interesting how it works across regions. How that is something that people, governments and cooperations believe in and argue for across different regions.

Thank you so much for the interview.

Silvia Lindtner was originally published in Arts and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Nina Prader

The RISO printer can bang out two pages per second. Made from light grey plastics and embellished with Smartie-coloured buttons, this Japanese print machine is named after its maker Riso Kagaku. In the beginning of the 1980s, the machine was found in every firm — even churches — and to this day, finds a home in some houses of state and schools. However, with artists as well as technicians the Risograph — similar to the tape cassette player — gains massive cult-status as the most user friendly printer.

Individual machines have robot names like GR3770 and are somehow (or precisely because of this) cool. When the micro publishing house Soybot, a Riso-printing-collective in Vienna, bought their first RISO — while still in art school — — it was clear that they wanted to make books. Since then, the micro publishing house has gone wild, printing everything from toy-boys, flannel, chemtrails, UFOs and demons in their zine and art book publications. Sometimes even printing protest flyers. Meanwhile the proud owners of 5 machines, they open the doors to their open print studio with RISO Friday — almost every Friday — -. According to the small publisher, the popularity of the machine is based on its speed, color intensity and easy operating system.

Push one button and it is possible to put fluorescent colours like neon, gold or acid green on paper.

The colours are soy-based, almost vegan (but still, don’t eat them!), and are therefore, sustainable and cost-efficient in relationship to other printing methods like digital printing or off-set. RISO Germany with their base in Hamburg explains, “The Risograph seems to always be kind of like the Dinosaur among other printing systems because they have existed for over forty years and very little has changed about their screen-print technology. However, to this day, they remain convincing and are loved dearly by their owners.” “This printer becomes very interesting,” the small Berlin-based publisher Pegasus expresses, who has devoted itself to this print-method, “in times of economic depression.” Tenderly, the publisher speaks of the “recession” printer that can print the red of Sparkasse, a German Bank, next to purple and black in their assortment. “Well-tempered and resilient” are further adjectives with which this instrument is lauded. Comparable to the eco-friendly milage of a Prius car: in the print world some RISOs have produced more than 16 Millionen pages.

Printing Scenes

But what really makes Risographs special are the communities and cultures that form around them. The buzzword is “accessibility”, finding application with artists and technophiles in DIY subcultures. Since the technology is vintage, the know-how is mainly distributed online or per word of mouth. The expensive color drums are traded amongst collectives. Though this, networks or in the-best-case scenario friendships are forged. When a piece of machinery is broken and technically, only expensively replaceable in Japan, one is reliant on contacts. Only kindred spirits can point you in the direction of the next 3-D printer that will replace your rare RISO piece, or make you aware of a sale on color-drums on E-bay. Behind this is an anarchist spirit and open source hardware ethics. The rallying cry seems to go: fierce printing, easy handling, and knowledge sharing. For this reason, Risographs have a scope in graphics and art publishing like for example, in zine-cultures. Since zine-culture is based on knowledge distribution and sustainability, the speed and eco-friendliness draws them to the printer. Also in political contexts the Risograph is used for posters and flyers. In the art world it also surfaces as a favorite tool. The technology experiences a kind of renaissance.

Mutant Playstation

Like on your classic copy-machine, one types the amount of copies into the colorful keyboard. The digital duplicator is a hybrid, operating like a scanner and screen-print mutant but is as easy to use as a playstation. Reducing printing to its most essential components of printing, it is just as layered as other printing techniques. Precisely, in the restrictions rests freedom: monochrome colors, rough paper, simple interface. To print in multiple colors, one has to exchange the color drum each time. A image or motif is placed face-down on the scanner-bed. Thus, it is copy-transferred onto a transparent that lies on the color drum. This is called a master. Normally, paper going through a copy machine makes a curve, risking a paper jam. Not so with the Risograph, the paper moves in a straight line through the machine. The color drum rolls over the paper, making a direct mark that the paper absorbs. An adrenalin kick, at lightning-speed multiplied: image on paper.

Because of its open data, the Risograph is a playground for nerds. Whoever owns a handbook is well-served but there are many tricks to be learned to change the hardware. In May, the first RISO convention in Vienna took place in the frame of the Coded Cultures Festival 2016 and the Open Hardware Europe Summit, initiated by the Research Institute for Art & Technology (RIAT). Here, an open handling of the technological resources was on the agenda. International collectives and publishers, using RISO, like Page 5 (Czech Republic), Look Back (Slovenia), Soybot (Vienna) and the Open Publishing Lab (Vienna) gathered to exchange and discuss hacks.

However, such a historical moment did not take shape as a podium discussion. Instead, the Risograph was clinically dissected and taken apart. The “organs”, the interior cables came to light. The participants bent over the machine, pointing at soft spots and rummaged in the entrails. “When you know how things work, you don’t have to be afraid of them”, a chairperson of RIAT adds.“Repairability” was the focus, a word that encompasses repairing and ability, whilst doctoring the server. Casually, personal RISO anecdotes were traded.

The RISO remains a classic, each print unique. In the future, very little will change about the old-school technology. However, the print-quality is supposed to improve. RISO Germany reveals: “Rice bran is a waste, produced in rice production — an extremely resource-friendly raw substance — and since our Japanese main company locally receives rice bran, the shorter transport minimizes CO2.” Using the RISO SF9350 as an example, its black ink will be based on rice rather than soy.

Simultaneously mysterious and totally understandable, the candy-color spraying RISO remains a kind contemporary of all-time: economically, ecologically, and culturally speaking.

Websites:

https://codedcultures.com/program/Intervention-RISO-Convention/

http://stencil.wiki/

http://www.hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.com/

http://soybot.org/

http://www.pegasusdruck.de/frame/f_verlag.htm

https://www.risoprinter.de/de/print-profit/haendlersuche/niederlassung-hamburg

Research Institute for Arts and Technology (RIAT)

Risograph Renaissance was originally published in Arts and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Can you tell us about your own background and how you got to work with Karkhana?

I completed my Electronics and Communication Engineering studies at one of the Engineering Colleges in Nepal. I always had interest in technology and tinkering. I was the kind of students who would stay in clubs more than in the classes. After I completed Engineering I co-founded the robotics association of Nepal. It was an umbrella organizations where different robot makers could come together. I volunteered for two years, but I was bored in the sense that there were no interesting clear developments that I could see in Nepal. I was about to come abroad for studies, but then I met Sakar in one of the google events. We discussed and it was a very good fit for us. My co-founder, Sakar, had come from a global area and I had the local understanding, so we decided to work together. To be honest, we didn’t know what will work, we had some general ideas. It was a very good fit and we realized it was very nice to work together. And that is how we started Karkhana.

Let me give you a small history of Karkhana. Because Karkhana didn’t start out as an education company, we started out as a product design company in Nepal. We were all engineers, we knew how to design things and make systems. One of the first products we designed in Nepal was a vending machine, that could work out of the mobile payment system. It was a collaborative research project. Working on that project we realized that there is no ecosystem for a product design company. Actually is was no ecosystem for ‘making’ in Nepal. There are so many problems: it was really hard to get good tools, it was really hard to get stuff, because everything had to be imported from abroad, there were no mentors available at any university. A lot of challenges, but the biggest challenge was the mind set. For example, if I would have asked one hundred engineers ‘Can you design a vending machine?’. Ninety-nine of them will say: ‘No’, but probably only one will say ‘I will try’. So the number of people who would say ‘I will try’ was very small. So I think the biggest challenge was the attitude and the mind set of people and general engineers. So we had to pivot our plan of a product design company and we started looking else. So when we realized that there is a gap between the people who design and who deliver, or let’s say between the people who imagine and the ones who make them real. For example, an architect and a construction worker. Both are working for the same objective, but the way they are working is totally different. Both of them work in Silos, and this Silo-mentality is the biggest challenge in creating something innovative and new. It stops the interdisciplinary integration. So that’s when we decided that Karkhana would work on education and that we will try to reduce this gap between the designers and the makers. At the beginning we thought that we will train engineers. But soon we realized that it is too late to try and change the attitude of engineers. So more than to teach them something new it was really hard for us to make them un-learn the things they knew. We tried to teach them design thinking processes, prototyping ideas, but they were stuck with their existing mind set and not able to challenge their understanding. So we thought the right way to do this is to work with the younger students.

And finally we settled down in middle school. A good age, where they have skills like reading, writing and mathematics and we give them skills like critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication. We also involve them into maker-based education, giving them ideas like design thinking. And finally packaging all of this into the concepts of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics. That’s how Karkhana exists today.

What is the key insight that you want to give to your students.

We have this one line: The world is malleable. We don’t want them to explain this idea, but we want them to have this insight after working with us some time. I think the only way to design and innovate something new is to understand that the world around you can be re-shaped with right skills. And everything that you see around you can be re-shaped, re-molded. Everything around us is malleable, right? If it’s a maker or engineer or politician or even anyone who is doing anything in this world, if he understands that the world around us is malleable and we can change it with right skills, that’s the biggest insight.

How do you choose your students? Or how do they choose you?

Karkhana has been working in maker-based education since three years. We don’t have the facility and time to select students. At the moment we work with student, parents and teachers who understand our work. These are generally middle school students who have some kind of interest in tinkering and making or technology at large.

Did you choose to become a company?

We are a private company.

Because it seems that you do a lot of non-profit work, right?

True, true! Yes that is a question we get asked a lot. My co-founders and me were always the kind of people who believed in profit-generation and we believed the only way to sustain a good economy is by true entrepreneurship. Also, of course, as you said, we do a lot of non-profit work. We collaborate with public schools, we design curriculums, we research on a lot of education activities, but we think that all these things we do has some value. I think that when we deliver this kind of work to different schools and parents it’s fair to charge them. I think in these terms it helps us to be sustainable. The reason we don’t fully depend on grants, although we do take some few grants at times, is because of our freedom. Because there are different grants that fit to our idea. So let’s say we would get a grant this year for three years, after three years we have evolved so much and our ideas have changed, in this case it makes us very rigid, and we always want to be flexible and self-sustainable. For this reason we have become a private company, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t work as an NGO. We are a social business, in that way we keep doing what we like and at the same time make an impact.

I heard that you had a big campaign right after the terrible earthquakes last year, can you explain that?

As you know Nepal was shook by an earthquake on Saturday. Luckily Saturday is a day were all the schools are closed. But Karkhana was open and we had a few students. Luckily noone was hurt and nothing happened. We secured all the students and parents. For a couple of days it was total chaos, we didn’t know what to do. For example I lost my house myself. I think it’s nothing compared to so many people who have lost lives and everything, but for a few days we were so confused what to do and what not to do. As educators, as entrepreneurs the kind of skills we had were not good enough for rescue efforts. After a few days we realized that as educators we have skills to engage students. Because after the earthquake there were so many shelter camps, all around in open grounds. We started making engagement lesson plans. We started making these activities and go out to different shelter camps and engage students. We thought as educators we can give some positive environment to students. At that point parents were in a total stress, the students were having lots of trauma, so we thought we could help them in that way. Slowly we started going to more and more places. And after a few weeks we had a bunch of lesson plans and realized that it could be used by any teacher all around the country, in all of the affected areas.

So we partnered with one of the other educational organizations and we converted the whole lesson plan into a transitory curriculum, a curriculum that can be worked through in two weeks. The idea was, for example, when the school would open it was not possible to say ‘Ok we start with the first lesson today, open your books and turn to page 2’. It’s not possible in this way, because people are in trauma, parents are not willing to send the students, they have a lot of deep trauma with them. They are really stressed. So teachers had no ideas of how they can engage students. Make them comfortable inside a school environment, because everybody is scared to come together in a school building. And we designed these transitory lesson plans that had a lot of activities, lots of hands-on activities actually, lots of games, lots of explanations and games about earthquakes to understand the earthquake. We designed this complete lesson plan and trained around 100 trainers at the beginning. And after these 100 trainers were trained they were sent out to 9 different districts and they trained another 6685 teachers, in 14 days! It was crazy! It was one of the biggest educational efforts that happened in Nepal after the earthquake. More than anything the satisfaction was so good, even when you were a teacher, even in times of crisis, there are things that you can do. Finally indirectly we reached around 200.000 students. That was really good. You know what was the biggest advantage that we got out of this crisis? We got the opportunity to inject activity based learnings inside the classes. Before the teachers and the students didn’t have the understanding, because they had never seen activity based classes or the tinkering based classes. We took this window of opportunity as a time where we could inject these kinds of lesson plans and lots of activities inside the classroom. So in a way this crisis helped us to amplify our work.

How did you implement open hardware in this effort?

It’s a mixed idea. As educators we use a lot of tools. And when we talk about tools it’s both, hardware and software. For example we have different programs where we teach technology, we have different programs where we teach design thinking processes. For example, we have a course called ‘Creative Computing’, this is a program where we teach our students how to think in a programming language, but not trying to teach them a language, but trying to teach them logics, to do this we use different open hardwares like Arduinos, other open hardwares and other open softwares as well. I think the interesting part about being a maker is that so many times we just create our own open hardware. For example, we have to design a balloon powered car. In those times we just look around, ask people who have created similar ideas, even open hardware means so many things these days. So the designs that made for their project, coupling with their software, we get a lot of inspiration from this work and combine them and create something new. I think the one of the biggest advantages of having this open mind set on open hardware and software is that it propagates creativity. When someone designs something and makes it open, another person can take it and add his understanding and value and create something new. For example, now we work a lot with a lasercutter.

You have a lasercutter there?

Yes, we brought one in a few months back. There are so many designs and open hardware ideas using lasercutters, so we’ve been downloading and working with them. It’s starts as simple as making a box, but there are as complex ideas as making a balloon powered car.

I think for educators and makers open hardware and software helps us a lot, because so many times we can not use it directly, but need to modify them in a way that it is more fitting for students. So open hardware and software helps us a lot. We not only use that we also try to contribute to the community, whenever we design something we try to upload it to our website. We have designed, for example, one year back this Arduino IDE(integrated development environment ) for Raspberry Pi. That actually has a monitor, so we uploaded the whole project on GitHub and made it open.

Everything we try to do we document it and put it together, we have got an active blog of different lesson plans we use as educators, different techniques, and now even work on space programs, how to make DIY Satellite. Everything we are doing we keep on the blog. (http://www.karkhana.asia/)

We are an organization that has been an increasing supporter of the open source community. We always believed that this is the way to go forward in a way that it’s a tool to educate more people.

And we always want to be part of the community which contributes to the community as well. Nepal is not a big country and we only existed for a couple of years, but it’s slowly starting to have a more maker-based community. more people working on open technologies. Slowly I think in Nepal we will have a bigger community.

Pavitra Gautam was originally published in Arts and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thanks for having the time for the interview.

Sure.

My first question would be: You are a person that was hanging out in many different hackspaces around Europe and the US. What are your impressions, how have they changed over time? What are the most significant differences you have observed?

Ehm..I’m sort of in one right now. And one of the major differences that I find there is…well I was kind of a founding member of Metalab in Vienna. And they always had an open door policy. So when a key member is in the space, anyone could come by. Which isn’t necessarily the case for C-base in Berlin, where there was always a ‘members only’ area. Now a lot of spaces in the US never really had an open door policy to begin with. They always wanted to be a little bit more exclusive and incentivize paying a membership fee.

Also because, specially in cities like New York, the rent is a lot higher, so the running costs, you need to recoup them somehow. But strangely enough, there is this one space that I’m in right now, in Manhattan called ‘Hack Manhattan’. And they have an open door policy, however, nobody ever comes by!

Strange, why is that?

I think there is a cultural difference with regards to open spaces in general. I think at least in Europe whenever I spent time around self-organized places there was always a sort of understanding that if a place says it’s ‘open’ you can just come by. And there will be locals and they sometimes will be at the beginning a little bit weird, but that’s always the case when a stranger comes by. But overalls it’s totally fine to come by. Whereas over here people feel like freeloaders.

There are not even homeless people in there?

No. I mean we did have one sort of homeless guy, but even he had spent time with noise bridge and other hackspaces around the US.

So it was a homeless hacker?

Sort of, yes. And so it’s really surprising how the service culture and capitalist mindset is so much stronger over here than it is in Europe. So that’s one of the major differences.

So is ‘hacking’ a culture specific term in general?

I’m not sure if it’s culture specific, but the way that is implemented certainly shows quite a lot of differences. I think there is a lot more — for example — joking about not necessarily legal forms of hacking in European spaces, while in the US I sort of seem to be the outlier when I make jokes about that. But there is a lot more incidents of people getting incarcerated for Computer misuse, I guess. So maybe it’s just that I’m not sensitive enough.

So there is just anxiety and not less people working on interesting projects? They are just underground?

I guess, yes.

There has been a big trend towards startup-ization, commercialization of hackspaces. The name ‘Bre Pettis’ in the past has been connected to this kind of change. Do you think it has become more common that people turn to proprietary or closed source varieties again?

I don’t know. I think, …(disruption of phone conversation). Hello?

So I guess people are not in that space, because the wifi is not good…

No, that’s always the case over here… ha ha…

The last thing I heard was ‘I don’t know’.

Yes, so I’m not sure that free software and open hardware and non proprietary stuff was ever such a huge concern. There was always a subgroup of people that really cared about it and wanted to have as much control over their tools as possible and there was the part of the community that was always sort of like…compromising. As in ‘Ok, this works, I’d rather have something that works as opposed to something that I need to put a lot of work into.’

More pragmatic, or what?

Yes, exactly. And I mean back in 2007 there was a strong tendency in the hacker community to adopt Apple hardware and all of a sudden everyone started using OS X. Which I’ve seen to be less of an issue these days, but it’s still like a popular OS in the community anyway. And I think the same thing happened with regards to 3D printers in a way. At least because the community or the people that wanna use these things grew so massively. People had different incentives to use these sort of things.

So they are really more makerspaces and fablabs than Hackspaces?

Yes, I’d say so I think so. But also in regards to starting up companies. If I compare the software side to the hardware side, there was always a bunch of hackspaces that had start-ups, that worked on proprietary web services. One of the more successful ones for example “mjam”. Mjam is an online ordering portal for food.

That was sold now, right?

I don’t know exactly, but yeah, that started at Metalab and it was always proprietary and nobody bothered them about like ‘Why don’t you open source this?’. And so I guess it’s like a similar development in the hardware community. Where at some point — where you don’t have a lot of issues and no problems with money or whatever — you happily work on something that is open, and a soon as you come under a little bit of capitalist pressure, you fold and you just go with the route that is easier.

When we met in Metalab, I guess around 2010/2011 there where a lot of artists in Metalab, I think. Do you think that hackspaces are still a place for artists or have they been moving, migrating to other spaces?

I’m not sure, I have not really been involved with European spaces so much in recent years. Over here there seem to be a fair amount of people involved in Hackerspaces that also consider themselves artists to a certain degree. And in the one I hang out in, the ‘Hack Manhattan’, that isn’t so much the case, but across the hall there is a gallery or collective called ‘Babycastles’.

Oh yes! That’s Kunal Gupta, right?

Yes, I don’t think he is involved anymore. But there is a bunch of artists that hang out over there and they sometimes pop over when Babycastles is having an event. And they just work in the hackerspace or use the tools that we have available. So there is an exchange going on, but there is not an understanding by the artistic crowd that they are hackers, I guess.

So what groups and organizations in NY interest you most at the moment, when it comes to open hardware or open source technology?

In New York? I honestly have no idea about NY in that respect.

Because you where telling me about some place…what was it?

Oh..Eyebeam…?

You said Eyebeam moved away, but then you said there is another place that you like.. rat house?

Rat Park. Ya, that’s the space or the house that I’m in. So the house is not really related to media arts or open hardware or whatever. It’s just a house owned by an anti-capitalist landlord, I guess. And he just is very happy to take in very strange people like ‘Babycastles’, ‘Hack Manhattan’ or OR Books, which is a publishing company, that also publishes stuff like, what was it called.. ‘Beautiful Trouble’.. It is a nice collection of artistic resistance and protest methods.

I checked out your website and it said: ‘Presently, Michael has an ambivalent relationship with art, activism, and computers. Feel free to inquire why.’ So.. he he.. I ask you why do you have an ambivalent relationship with art, activism, and computers?

Ok, so let’s start with the easiest: computers. Computers don’t really feel like home, like they used to. And that is in part because I guess the community surrounding them changed so massively. I started to being involved with hackers etc..when I was fairly young, hanging out at IRC etc…contributing to Open Source projects and there was more of a sense of… ok, all these things like: ‘decentralized infrastructure, owning your own hardware, knowing what you do, that’s important’. And by now whenever I check out a piece of software for example, I do some system administration and I want to have software that helps with monitoring, I do some research, I find something that I like, I try to install it and then I notice that it downloads 2,4 GB of code. Just because there are so many dependencies to get it to run.

Crazy.

And I don’t need to install node.js to compile some piece of java script that is then included in the client. So there is all these sort of icky things — that are normal these days- that I really don’t feel comfortable with. Or that Microsoft is getting praised because they incorporate bash compatibility in windows 10 or something. That’s completely insane to me, that you would see that as a positive development! No! That’s just a power grab by them! So that’s the computer side.

With regards to activism — I mean we can see it right now- specially in the US — with the whole debate around encryption. This debate already happened in the 90s and it was sort of resolved back then. And now it comes up again. And that is what I’ve seen over the last past couple of years whenever there is a major breakthrough in the activist community.. we’ll celebrate for a bit…and then a couple of months later the same thing — the same thing! — pops up again and everyone is burned out! So there is a constant pressure from,… let’s be paranoid and say…from powerful people or powerful interests on a rather small group of people that does the same work over and over and over again. And so that’s what I feel like: Is it worth going down that route? Or should maybe try and adopt completely different strategies? For example, say fuck it, we are gonna loose the legal battles anyway, always to some degree. Or maybe we are not gonna lose the legal battles, but we are gonna lose the implementation, because they are gonna pass new laws that are illegal again, but they will be implemented for a number of years before we can get rid of them again. So why not say ‘fuck it’ and develop technologies that circumvent that and make them as easily accessible and usable as possible.

You have to be quite privileged to have the time to develop that or you are at a university or institution that pays you.

And then art: I have a hard time with media art. I have always had a hard time with media art. Because I think a lot of it is rather gimmicky, and hasn’t really lived up to some of the promise that the field comes with. Meaning that…I always perceived an understanding in the community that we are at the forefront of society and we see all these new human developments and just put them in an artistic form. But to be honest, generative art and stuff like that…or saying ok, we are playing with big data and gonna put sounds to it, and let’s say this big data set composes sort of new pieces of music.

Well, Cage has done that in the 50s and 60s already.. there is always bad art..

Right. No, I think there should be a much tighter integration of society, technology and its effects on each other, I guess. In media arts in general.

I guess people who buy media art are the very people you described first as powerful, influential and rich. And they of course will not support art that is too critical, I guess.

But there is bitforms gallery in NY, right?

I don’t know bitforms gallery, actually, maybe I know them and have visited them before, but forgot. Where are they?

Allenstreet 131, media culture, I can send you the link.

As I said, I don’t really feel like I want to check that out, because it usually depresses me when I go to places like that. Baby castles across the hall are somewhat in that realm I guess and they recently hosted an event by …a collaboration between Eyebeam and Pioneer Works and they had four lectures of which two were quite good, I thought, but they were exactly again incorporating society and technology and finding ways to deal with it. Now I had criticisms with regards to both projects, but I was positively surprised that sometimes this stuff is not as under represented as I think.

So what do you currently work on? Is it Open Hardware or Open Source Software? Or none of the above?

I just finished my Masters Program last year.

Great! Congratulations!!

And now I’m sort of re-aligning and trying to find out what my interests are. Last year I commonly said that I’m in a very nihilistic phase of my life where I don’t believe anything positive will come of anything anyway, so whenever something slightly positive happens, I’m exhilarated, because I don’t expect it. So I’m still sort of in that area. But I guess now I have personally a little bit more interest to get enthusiastic about something again. I’m not quite sure if that something is gonna be conceptional art that doesn’t really deal with technology, or if its some technological project or if its just hanging out at hackerspaces..I don’t know.

Ha, ha, ha…but well, you were always quite cynical about the world. I mean, now maybe you are a bit tired from doing your Masters — so you sound jaded, but I think you were always quite critical so maybe that’s your approach.

I guess what frustrated me, even though I always was very critical I always saw positive developments, I was cynical but with a lot of hope. And that hope isn’t as present right now. And I guess that’s where I would like to get back to, but I’m not quite sure where that hope is gonna pop up.

I saw a really beautiful lecture by Genesis P-Orridge at the California College of the Arts, and it got me to ponder about in my own interest in certain artistic endeavors.

What about the presidential elections. Is there any hope?

In Austria or the US?

Oh in the US. In Austria it’s not really relevant.

The issue with the presidential elections over here is the false hope that one person comes in and changes something. Politically speaking I would say that I would prefer if Bernie Sanders would become president. But I’m not sure this is gonna be enough.

I don’t think it’s necessary either. It doesn’t really matter who becomes president. In my opinion, if a grassroots campaign, that is sustained over a number of years, if they actually get a lot of local politicians elected, that would probably be much more effective than having one dude at the top. I doubt that the political landscape in the US would allow that, because so much focus is given on this one thing. They are doing a campaign over the course of one year, that’s insane for a presidency that lasts four years.

So I’m positively surprised how successful Sanders is and I wish him all the best for the upcoming NY election, but I’m slightly afraid that he’s not gonna win and the campaign will sort of end there, because he didn’t have enough supporters to win NY.

I’m sorry, I have to end the interview, because we are running out of time. Is there anything you wanna tell the people of Austria who come to the open hardware summit in May?

Play more and have liberal licenses!

Ok! Ha ha ha! Thank you so much, Michael, I will stop the recording now.

Michael Zeltner on art and activism was originally published in Arts and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Could you for the beginning tell us a little bit about your background?

Sure. My name is Madeline Gannon. I’m trained as an architect, but I wandered in a sort of nebulous field of robotics and computer science. So a lot of the work that I do looks at better ways to communicate with machines that can make things. So this could be 3D printers or laser cutters or industrial robots — this is what I have been working a lot with lately. But I’m really interested in how we can take these machines that have so much agency to make stuff and find better ways to interact with them that go beyond just our computers and our software.

How did you start madlab?

I made a website and it was there!

Ha ha ha! Brave new world!

Yes, exactly! Madlab was really started as a repository of the work that me and some collaborators and friends were making. A lot of it was really just focused on — again- seeking out areas that weren’t really developed in human robot and human computer interaction and finding really compelling ways to also bring design into that world.

So a lot of the work that I do through madlab is really a designers and architects answer to some of these big questions in human computer interaction or human robot interaction.

The work you do now is really poetic and very delightful. What is it that inspires you most to develop these ideas?

There is a lot of internal curiosity that I have that bounces back and forth between research and wanting to discover new ways of making and new ways of doing things. And then design, where I just want to flex those muscles and make something that is exquisite or intriguing. That’s the two worlds I try to walk in between.

So you worked also with these gigantic industrial robots. What if their is an error and the arm hits you, isn’t it highly dangerous?

There is no reward without risk! That’s part of the problem and the delight in working with these machines. It is quite literally like you are a lion’s tamer. You know, the people in the circus that tame wild beasts. You know that these things might be trained, but if you loose focus, if you loose your attention, that they could also maul you. So that’s were a little bit of the poetry comes back in, is with the risk. But the sort of black and white controls working of the machine it in the relationship that I can build with this anonymous object that just in how it moves it gives me a way to project empathy onto it, to see it as more than just a machine — even though that’s all it is — it’s just a machine. Doing what I tell it to do. But when you eliminate the technical barriers that we normally use as computer interfaces to a machine, you can see it as much more: you can see it more as a companion or an apprentice in many ways.

Do you think it will ever be Open Hardware, this kind of really big machines?

The hardware: it is interesting. It’s a really interesting time to be working with robotic arms. They are quite old technology, they are quite dumb technology as well. It’s just a bunch of servos and some steel welded together. What we are starting to see is that robotic arms smaller versions, they are usually called collaborative robots, that they are starting to pop up in the scene, these robotic arms that are under 10.000 dollars. Which is where laser cutters have come down from. Where you have these 50.000 dollars laser cutters that you can now do for fiber and glass.

It’s interesting, I’m fortunate enough to use a lot of the robots that I have through institutions, so there is still that access barrier, where they are just not giving you access to the actual hardware. But to be honest, what is more preventative to working with these machines is the access to knowledge and the robotics companies don’t make access to knowledge very accessible. So a lot of the work that I have been doing has been addressing that issue. How can you break down any of these barriers to creativity. With these machines and take that viable knowledge and make it available to various groups of people.

Do you think it could ever be normal in the future to interact with an industrial robot outside the factory?

I hope so, that’s what I’m hoping for, that’s what I’m working towards. You already see them out of factories in film sets, that’s a really exciting area, because it’s scenic, choreographed and somehow alive. There is also some people working with different arms on construction sites as a demolition robot. There is also light factories, there is an assumed elevated risk for it (…interrupted)

So that’s very interesting, they have started to trickle out, but for the most part there hasn’t been a lot of choice to bring it to artist studios, bring it to laboratories, bring it into kitchens and domestic settings. But once the cost goes down there is still a huge barrier which is: how do I make it incredibly easy and useful to use for someone without any technical background.

What was for you the biggest challenge in collaborating with robots? Apart from the knowledge factor.

I’m very spoiled in coming from the creative coding community where processing and open frameworks and others have documentation on everything. But with these robots if you are trouble shooting it is really the biggest issue. And you can call the robot company and they send you a pdf, and you call them again and they send you a different pdf, and you call them again and they send you a different pdf, and you just jump around, trying to piece together this information. So it’s very ‘stop and go’ if you are developing with them, because you can be stuck on an issue for 3–4 days. Someone somewhere knows and you just have to find the right pdf of that.

What I will be releasing at the open hardware summit is a new tool that a college and myself have been working on, that is an open frameworks add-on for robot arms. We are trying to put all the knowledge that we built working with robots and just put it out there, into this open source community. The robots themselves aren’t open source, but that’s another big challenge. But they are becoming more affordable, fortunately.

So it will be an open library, basically?

Yeah, we are calling it OFX Robot Arm, it will be part of open frameworks.

How did you get into programming in the first place?

That’s a winding path. When I was finishing up my architectural studies my university got a CNC writing machine, which is like a big 3D printer, but it subtracts material instead of adds material. And I really quickly hit the limits of what the software for that robot machine could do. This is what inspired me to learn how to program. Because I realized that whatever an engineer decided how this machine should be used that is the only way that it can be used. And I wanted to be able to have more open means of experimenting with this incredible hardware. And that part was the long rabbit hole down into programming.

What do you usually use to program?

I usually use Java or C++ and I work a lot with Processing and Open Frameworks.

And you are going to present this open CV add-on in Vienna?

It’s not an open CV add-on, that’s a different thing, I don’t want to confuse it or send the wrong message, but yes, it is an open frameworks add-on, it will work when we release it and show some videos in Vienna.

I’m really excited to see it! What’s your plans for the future, what’s your next project or next idea?

A lot of the work I’m doing right now is using robots to design and fabricate directly on your body. It’s a continuation of some of the work that I have been doing with designing on the body. And now I will close the loop and actually fabricate a digital design directly on the body.

So that’s the tools that we are releasing, that’s all the ground work, that’s the foundation work for this project, that I have worked on for a while. We are just going to let everyone else have the same tools we are using at the same time.

Do you see it as a design object or an art object or as assistive design? What’s your favorite way of how people could use this application?

The formula that I usually use is to make a new tool, that doesn’t exist before and then make design objects, creating objects with them. That has been my usual formula, that’s the only way to get people interested about software.

Ha ha ha. Really hands-on approach to software.

Exactly: ‘It can make something pretty, right?’

You design on the body, right, and then it’s becoming a real object that fits on the body, right? I was just wondered if you would put it back again into bigger scale and use these body forms as architecture models?

I never really thought of that, as jumping, oscillating between scales of building scale and body scale, that’s interesting.

So you are interested in the human scale.

A lot of that is conditioned, because that’s just what the fabrication machines are — sort of at the human scale.

How big was the biggest 3D printer you worked with?

The biggest 3D printer I have done was maybe a foot and a half by a foot. These necklace pieces that go around the shoulders. But are those printers that are three feet by two feet by two feet, so almost a cubic of material. But there are bigger ones out there that I could use.

Have there been shown in fashion shows, the necklaces?

The necklaces I did were distributed during fashion week in New York. But that is an old project at this point, that was 2012.

I still haven’t seen something like it before or after.

I have to stop here, because its already 15 minutes. Thank you so much for your time, sorry I was late.

Oh no problem, it was really wonderful meeting you and I look really forward to seeing you in Vienna.

Madeline Gannon on robotics and computer science was originally published in Arts and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You describe your tools are postpornographic — can you explain in more detail what postpornographic/postpornography means and how open hardware is related to that?

Post pornography is a term that I started to use in Spain in 2004. It was first used when a group of people started to talk about the porn scene. How the representation of the body was always related to the genitals. In porn movies its always the “dig” and the “cunt”, parts of the body sometimes look like a chicken, you know?

All you see is only this body part and skin, very much like a spectacularization of the genitals. So the post porn movement tries to regain this territory of sexuality and use and create their own representation. And not related only to the genitals, but also to sexualize all the body. In postpornographic videos or productions you can see that it’s not centric like this. It’s more playing with identities, also with binary things like man and woman and penetration. But everything can become genitals, all the body can become part of eurotica and sexual play. So that is what postpornography is, it’s something different to porn, it’s like “take back the porn” and territory and put the political into it and put the gender issues there, the gender fluid issues and all these kind of things. Not the monogamy things, playing with more relations, etc. It’s kind of this queer scene inside there and trans that go in there… all these issues. This is the postpornographic.

So now when we talk about this in the Hardware, for example, for us, because we work with electronics, we say that we are trans-hack-feminists and this is very important for us. A good example could be the jack plug. Because normally they have this macho name — at least in Spanish — female and male connectors, we say that we don’t use this kind of term, we instead have the “ass” connector and the “dildo” connector, you know? This is how we use the postpornographic in the language of machines. Also these gender things, hetero-normative, patriarchial things,.. it’s about how we can disrupt this, also in our language and how we can make it happen in open hardware, as an example. I don’t know if I answered your question with this?

So naming is very important to you?

Yes, the power of naming, the power to name the things, we create the language! So even if we don’t believe in e.g. the female/male, we are still always repeating it, we are repeating it in our language. So we have to be critical about that. If we are critical we can use it again. Because we made these disruptions and reflections about it. So there is a lot of… you know in electronics or computers, for example, in the older computer towers you have the “master and slave” in the hard drives, or you had the “motherboard”!

Yes, all these metaphors..

Or the “clit” thing in the mouse, the clit-mouse… all these things… so there is a lot of language of the body in the machine. We reflect about this and try to practice it everyday.

So you do a lot of workshops, right? And there you raise the question of how all these tools can also be educational and sex toys can be educational? And how could these sex toys and medical devices be used in an educational way? How do you implement them in a workshop?

Ok, well in a workshop. What do you mean with sex toys?

Actually, its not really sex toys, what you developed was the biolab emergency box, its actually medical devices, right?

Yes.

So how would you use this in an educational workshop context?

Well, in a workshop context it depends, because we are still developing it. But at the same time we really want to try to develop tools that can blur these lines and limits between these kind of things. For example, there is a big taboo about the “prostate”. The prostate is not an organ that only men have, we have a prostate! A prostate is not a gendered organ, you cannot say there are women lungs and women hearts and women etc… even if some stupid people try to make these scientific differentiation of the brain. The same way you cannot say it’s male or female blood. We all have a prostate! To stimulate the prostate, for example, you can build your own tools. It has to do with your health. At least in the male imaginary, the prostate is a kind of… homophobic imaginary. It’s like “… this doctor that came with the glove like this and his fingers… coming… and was so scary…” and this is very homophobic in the end. Also in this imaginary people think that a man, a sexual hetero-normative man can only rely on this other man, who is an expert. Laurie Anderson said, “only an expert can deal with the problem”. And they don’t rely on their partner or your wife or your own, even in your own. So how can you relate sexuality with DIY toys to make your own exploration of the prostate? Because the only way that you can know that something is for example going wrong in your body is, if you know it before, if you touch yourself before. How can I know that something is wrong in my breast, if I don’t touch myself? I have to know by touching myself, not only make machines that will see what happens. It’s about touching yourself and then know how to read data about your body. And also with the female prostate, or as we call it the “Anarcha Gland”, it’s also about touching yourself. You can touch it with your fingers or maybe dildos. This practice of toys is part of re-claiming the health of some organs, that have been taken away from you.

So the open hardware part is that you can make exactly the tool that you want for examining yourself? Or testing on yourself?

Yes, and also the idea of making this tool is to reclaim our senses. As I said before, medicine, but not only medicine, the medical system’s power is to disconnect us from our body. So if something happens, we say, “Let’s go to the doctor!”. If something happens, you don’t even really know what is happening to your body. So this Do-It-Yourself health or gynecology or the prostate DIY things… here the idea is to reclaim our body and reclaim our senses. Reclaim the touching, seeing again ourselves. Look at your own cervix. How it looks when you are with menstruation. And without menstruation. Before and after you had birth for example, it changes a lot. And when you feel the smell, when you feel it’s different… You can enhance (magnify) make bigger with the technologies we have. The DIY technology, for example the DIY microscope, it helps to enhance and make bigger your sense of looking. So not only looking, but then seeing through the microscope how it really looks. And start to understand and comprehend and getting biological knowledge about your body that we have been disconnected of. So its about making tools to enhance our senses. To reclaim our body. Its a cyborg sort of thing, you know?

Is this what you call open source biology then? Opposed to closed biology? That it’s decentralized who is touching whom, so it’s not the expert only?

Yes, it’s not only the expert, but also to reclaim it for a group of people. There is a lot of taboo if we talk about our health. To talk about our sexual health or what happened “down”. To at least share it with the people that you love, you know? The five people that you always think about, that you have around. Because all bodies are different. These experts they get the knowledge just because they have access to bodies. They have access to a lot of bodies, so that’s the way that they gain their knowledge, because they can look at hundreds and hundreds of bodies. So the only way is to look at the people that we have around, to get again into these health groups or even studying groups. Once in a week or once in a month to talk with the people that care about your health and share things and even share what the doctors said. “The doctor said this to me”, ”Ahh, this happened to me!”, of course it would not be the same for everybody, the solution or even the problem.

Do you think that these open hardware tools can start the conversation, make it easier to talk about things that are connected with shame and shyness, orgasms are usually not something people talk about. Do you think that the open hardware tools can make people start the conversation?

Yes, I think so. It’s an interesting thing. Because people… I don’t want to make a big generalization of people… but sometimes if you talk about technology, people think its more “believable”, you know? So you can talk about these things. But if you only talk about the body:

“…Ah maybe you are too esoteric..maybe you are homeopath…”. It’s good to put these things together, because they are related. This knowledge of technology came from maybe taking first the smell etc..so its a gathering of things — we have to talk about technologies, our body and the experience together. In both senses, to taking back the technology of our body and the technology of machines. It’s mixed.

Yesterday I went to the gynecologist and she used a lot of tools on me that I don’t have at home of course and I don’t really know how they work. But you were re-making them, right? For example you made this speculum? In 3D print?

Well, the 3D speculum was a collaboration that Urs (hackteria) made for us. We are also doing different tools together. We are making research on where these tools come from. Because we don’t know where a lot of medical tools and medical knowledge comes form. Medicine has this very dark side. They need bodies so there is a lot of experiments on people. There is medical apartheid. And even the gynecological tools, you know, they were built through the bodies of black slaves in the United States in the eighteen hundreds. So they were used like guina pigs without anesthesia. The speculum was built there, but we only know the name of the guy who is the “father” of gynecology. “The father” it’s a patriarchal thing. Now we know the names of at least three of the slaves: Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey. These were the three slaves, but there were at least ten more that were used and they were anonymous. And all these tools that maybe the gynecologist has used in your body, they were built in the bodies of these women. And we don’t know nothing about it. So the idea to re-build these tools is also to re-build these stories. It’s like go backwards and take back the memory of the older women and all these people who have been used as guina pigs and we don’t know. We only know the white guys in their white coats and with these big statues in universities.

So you have developed several strategies to meet this problem, right? Tactics like giving new names, the names of the victims, like Lucy Gland and Betsey Gland?

Yes, it’s the power of naming as I said before. It’s the way to re-claim our bodies and re-claim the stories, the history, the her-story. De-colonize history and de-colonize our body, because we have a lot of names in our body.

Like — in fact — I was realizing this because I was thinking “What does Skene Gland mean?”. Skene Gland is synonmyous of the female prostate, the prostate of our body. So I was thinking “Skene? What is that supposed to mean? I wanna know the etymology of this word”. And then I found that there was this guy, with beard, who was studying with the other guy, Sims. Sims was that “father of gyneology” who did the experiments on Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey. So why do we have the name of a guy here? Skene Gland? And then you have fallopian tubes. Fallopian was the surname of another guy. And then you have Papanicolaou (Pap-test), even the exam is the name of another gynecologist.

Uterus is also a male word.

It looks down there like a gay sauna down there, only guys inside! We have to take them out! Because they got the knowledge from all the people and all women that they were using, who were anonymous. So this is also part of the project. Because when we realized this, it became totally necessary: “We have to re-claim the tools, we have to make our own tools, we have to get the knowledge, got to re-claim the body!” It was also a rage behind it. Rage to know the real story of how these tools were built. And we don’t know nothing about these women and the horror that they went through.

So we had to do something about that.

I’m afraid it’s a dark history of medicine in general, because I think also the first heart surgery was done on black people only and only when black people did not die on the heart surgery anymore they did it on white people.

Yeah, and in fact this “father of gynocology” he was trying to solve the fistula. You know “fistula”?And when he solved the problem he started to do it on white women with anesthesia. On black women he did it without anesthesia!

And also the “fathers of obstetrics”, their name is Hunter and Smelly. These guys, in this anatomical period they send out to kill women. They were the fathers of obstetrics because they had hundreds and hundreds of drawings, very accurate of stages of pregnancy in different women. Nine months pregnancy… very healthy woman just about to give birth — how did they get that body? It was realized later that they were sending to kill women. They were sending to kill women for four years and then for four years not, because they didn’t want to get caught, and then again four years, all in all twelve years. And they had all kinds of pregnant women that you can imagine, because they were sending to kill, saying “we need this kind of woman” to somebody. And they were bringing it. And this was also how the anesthetic knowledge was built. On women, by murdering anonymous women.

I’m speechless, this is so terrible. I mean there was a lot of research also in the holocaust. In the concentration camps. On Jewish women, socialist women, handicapped people.

That on the one hand, but also on the other hand in Latin America there appear cases now in the public about Indigenous women, who have been sterilized without consent. They were sterilizations of some people. The body in this part is very violent.

How do you think that these women could get access to open hardware? Because it’s still difficult to learn these skills? To use a 3D printer, right? Even the speculum — someone else made it for you, right? It’s not so easy to make.

Yes, I think — for me really — I don’t think the 3D speculum is very useful. It’s something important, because I think we have to speak all the languages. And 3D printing is a language, that is mostly spoken in that white, north, first world. We know that. But we think we have to also go to these places. But I think it’s useless in other countries, not important. That’s why we also develop other kind of techniques and tools. We are researching on techniques that don’t need so much technology. Like the vinegar test for example. Do you know the vinegar test?

No.

So the vinegar test is made from kitchen vinegar. So we found this, because there was a group of doctors who went to an area in India, to an area were there was a high rate of cervix cancer. The thing is, to make the exam of cervical cancer, you have to make the pap test. So you take a scratch of cervix tissue and then you send it to the laboratory and then they make a solution. This solution is based mostly on acetic acid. Acetic acid is mostly common vinegar. So this group of people went to rural places to these women with a speculum, with a cotton thing and the vinegar. So they were using the speculum, putting vinegar into the cervix and waiting for one minute. If after this one minute something strange happened inside, like e.g. bubbles or white colorings — this could mean that there is some mutation happening. So it could be a pre-cancer, a cancer or something else. Or hopefully nothing. So with this simple technique, without laboratory, they reduced the cervical cancer rate through 31 % in three years. Because it was just about going there and putting it in there and say: yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, and the ones that have a positive test, they take tissues and they bring it to a laboratory. Because normally in these rural places women only go to the hospital if something is very wrong. So with this they reduced it. And it was amazing because it’s a very simple technique.

So the idea of the speculum — of course it’s not easy to print a speculum. So we start now to try to see which other tools from home can be used. And with Fred Kuang-Yi from Taiwan, you know? Who invited me to Taipei, it was very nice to be with him. We were talking because we want to work together this year, because he is going to be in the Netherlands, and we want to start to create new tools, that’s the idea: design something more simple with things you have at home. So we are just trying different techniques.

So it’s not 3D printing, but rather re-cycling?

Yes, yes. So that’s another step. It was really nice that someone did this for us, the 3D printing. Because, I want to repeat, I think its important to speak all the languages. So that’s why we make presentations, workshops, performances, we are talking about the same — but in different languages. We also have a wiki, a video…all the platforms that we have on the internet, we are using facebook…whatever..everything!!

Thanks so much, it’s really, really cool what you are doing. I have to stop the interview now, because it can be only 15 minutes. Thank you so much!

Ok!