Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the making of the open source phone RePhone was aimed at opening up the black box of contemporary electronics production, and in so doing proposed China itself as design material.

Paper long abstract:

In September, 2015, Seeed Studio, an open source hardware design and production company in Shenzhen, China, released their latest DIY toolkit: the RePhone. The RePhone is an open source phone kit, comprising modules of bundled functionality that can be plugged together to assemble a phone of one's liking such as a phone with three cameras or a phone with two sim card slots. "What if we designed a phone to be anything we want to be?," the video of the RePhone Kickstarter campaign posits, "for the last 8 years in Shenzhen, Seeed Studio has been busy hacking the electronics supply chain, to make advanced tools and technologies available to everyone. The result is the RePhone."

This paper unpacks how the making of the open source RePhone is aimed at opening up the black box of industrial production. The RePhone was designed to translate the social and technological complexity of Chinese industrial production into a technological vernacular familiar to a transnational network of open source hardware geeks, artists, designers, and start-ups. By packaging processes of manufacturing into a set of open components, the RePhone functions like a magnifying glass, a detailed, albeit crude, glimpse into select aspects of production. The making of the RePhone, I argue, serves an epistemic function, i.e. it offers lines of thinking about designing and producing through the social and material fabric of Shenzhen. Shenzhen itself becomes the design material, all the while China is remade into a site of expertise in technology innovation.