This July, students are invited to 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.

Distributed Design Market Platform is contributing to this international summer school by hosting a stream of content that promotes the concept of Distributed Design in a global context. This presents an opportunity to further investigate the values of the platform which are arising as part of the second year of the four-year project with specific focus on the Distributed Design Quality Label (European Makers Quality Label.)

Location: Shaji Town, Jiangsu Province, China

Dates: July 14–24, 2019

Activities: Visits to Taobao factories and Talks, Design and Manufacturing workshops

Faculty lead by: David Li, Tomas Diez, Jason Hilgefort

SZOIL, IAAC, AFAC, IAU, Wikifactory, Distributed Design Market Platform, and Fab City, invite Chinese and international designers, makers, architects, urbanists, entrepreneurs, and innovators, to participate in the Shaji Studio summer program. The program will take place in the first Taobao village, an urban manufacturing phenomenon that is transforming the industry, innovation, and consumption in China.

Whilst this is not the Distributed Design Summer School, an annual event which will this year take place at The Kamp in Eindhoven in June; it does present an excellent opportunity for anyone interested in Distributed Design to gain first-hand experience on the ground in China with dedicated content about DD delivered by Tomas Diez. The event is also presented in collaboration with Wikifactory, a Distributed Design Market Platform affiliate.

You can read about the context of Shaji on the Fab City blog.

Apply to the workshop here!