The Taco Lab who are probably best known for the Siftables (small cookie-sized tile computes that sense each other) shown at TED have a blog with some interesting posts like this one on American Shanzhai?. Shanzai literally means “mountain fortress” or the hideout of bandits and it refers to pirate activities like hacking cheap copies of consumer goods (that are heavily marked up.) It is now beginning to refer to a creative subculture of improving or altering electronics outside state (and IP) control. Thus the image above is from the Taco Lab blog and is a example of this creative shanzai – in this case a cell-phone/cigarette pack whose value is in its uniqueness. This got me thinking of all the open projects out there that make it easier to hack things like:
- TuxPhone – a project to develop open hardware and software for a cell phone.
- Arduino – an open electronics prototyping platform that’s great for interactive art projects
- LilyPad Arduino – an open device that is light enough for wearables and e-textile projects
- William Turkel’s Fabrication Lab – a unique (to my knowledge) humanities lab