How did China’s mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? This talk, based on Professor Lindtner’s most recent publication "Prototype Nation" (Princeton University Press, 2020), offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Professor Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–08, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation.

Silvia Lindtner is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information. She researches, writes and teaches about DIY (do-it-yourself) maker culture, with a particular focus on its intersections with manufacturing and industry development in China. Drawing on her background in interaction design and media studies, she merges ethnographic methods with approaches in design and making. This allows her to provide deep insights into emerging cultures of technology production and use, from a sociological and technological perspective.

Together with Anna Greenspan (NYU SH) and David Li (XinCheJian), Silvia Lindtner is also the co-founder of the Research Initiative Hacked Matter. Hacked Matter. It has, since its inception in 2011, organized a series of workshops, lectures, public panel discussions as well as hands-on engagements with questions of DIY making, manufacturing, and innovation ecosystems.

Zoom webinar; attendance requires registration: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wJ0Z2eYHQ6GWAu1oqDbkeA