How E-Commerce and Digital Fabrication Brought Prosperity to Rural China
A Tale of Shaji Taobao Village
FROM THE FACTORY OF PRODUCTS OF THE WORLD, TO THE FACTORY OF FACTORIES FOR FAB CITIES
Learn from China’s first “Taobao Village”: Shaji Town, a farming village that has taken up e-commerce on a large scale, becoming a significant force behind the development of rural e-commerce in China. Work, learn, design, and debate about the Shaji ecosystem, rural development and urbanization issues, new online entrepreneurial models, and more with people from different disciplines.
Location: Shaji Town, Jiangsu Province, China
Date: 14-24 July, 2019
Fee: €1500 (Flights to Shanghai not included)
Activities:
More about Shaji, the first Taobao Village in China
How does Shaji Work?
An overview of Shaji, the first Taobao village in China that demonstrated how e-commerce can bring development and prosperity to the rural area.
The Drawings in the "About Shaji" part is by Carmen Kwok
The drawings in the "About Taobao Villages" part is by Sylvia Yeung.
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Who We Are
Studio Shaji and The summer school is collectively organized by IAAC, Fab City, SZOIL, Aformal Acadamy, IAU, Distributed Design Market Platform and Wikifactory.
IAAC
The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) is based in Barcelona. It is concerned with research, education, production and outreach that envisions the future habitat of our society by building it in the present.
IAAC follows the digital revolution at all scales (from bits to geography, from micro-controllers to cities, from materials to the territory) to expand the boundaries of architecture and design and meet the challenges faced by humanity. An experimental and experiential centre where one learns by doing, through a test methodology that promotes real solutions. With ELISAVA Design School and in partnership with experts from Fab Lab Barcelona, IAAC delivers the Master in Design for Emergent Futures, an innovative degree that engages students from across the world in designing responses to our rapidly changing social, cultural and economic reality. The program reflects Fab Lab Barcelona's research interests across open source, digital tools and networked platforms. One such research project currently being delivered by the Fab Lab Barcelona team is a four-year Creative Europe project, Distributed Design Market Platform, which aims to make sense of the cultural and technical revolution arising from the intersection of digital design and the maker movement.
Fab City
In 2014, the then mayor of Barcelona challenged cities to produce everything they consume by 2054. Fab City Global Initiative is enabling this shift away from the industrial paradigm of Product-in Trash-out, by enabling the return of manufacture to cities supported by a Data-in Data-out urban model. It comprises a Network of 28 cities, a core Collective and is governed by a foundation. We are working to make locally productive, globally connected cities and citizens.
SZOIL
Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, established by Maker Collider and SIDA, is a space and a platform for worldwide makers to communicate and cooperate. Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab is also the first Fablab authorized by MIT as a research and development partner of Fablab 2.0. The lab dedicates in exploring the issues and developing solutions to connect the massive production ecosystem to small hardware startups so as to promote the international standing of Shenzhen in the development of digital intelligent hardware and manufacturing and build a future intelligent hardware Silicon Valley by combining new open source method and current manufacturing system in Shenzhen.
Aformal Acadamy
Aformal.Academy – RE:Learning The City is a spatial and co-creational knowledge exchange, a process of multi-layered learning across disciplines, for all.
Institute of Autonomous Urbanism
The disruptive developments of dispersed infrastructure frames a moment in time where we can fundamentally reconceive of how we make, fund, and conceptualize the world that surrounds us and how we engage with the possibilities of a new Autonomous Urbanism
Distributed Design Market Platform
The Distributed Design Market Platform is a four-year project funded by the European Union through the Creative Europe fund. It acts as an exchange and networking hub for the European Maker Movement. It consists of both online and offline activities such as events, resources, workshops, fairs and bootcamps that promote and advocate for emerging creative talent in Europe and their business productivity and sustainability. With events across Europe the Platform also supports the mobility of emerging creatives and their work.
Wikifactory
Wikifactory is a "social design and production" platform, in a similar vein to how for example youtube is a social video platform, or github a social coding platform.
You can think of it as a combination of:
1) an online community of designers, engineers, makers, technologists and other creative problem solvers, and
2) a set of collaboration tools designed to help you and your team work on physical products of all stages and sizes.
© 2019