Shenzhen Map for Makers, 2013 collected on the occasion of the exhibition V&A in Shenzhen: Rapid Response Collecting, staged at the 5th Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, The Value Factory, Shenzhen.

Shenzhen Map for Makers is made by Seeed Studio, a Shenzhen-based open-source hardware startup. Who have mapped Shenzhen’s electronic markets and factories, and released the information as an openly accessible map. Written in English, the map is intended to help those not from the city access the astonishing manufacturing capability of Shenzhen. Seeed Studio began by focussing on Huaqiang North, the vast electronics market of Shenzhen, and mapped suppliers, factories, restaurants and cafes, accommodation, leisure activities, transport network and so on.

Shenzhen, China’s first special Economic Zone is located at the tip of the Pearl River Delta. The city grew from a modest fishing town into a vast, sprawling metropolis of more than fifteen million in just thirty-five years, through manufacturing, trade and relentless commercial energy. Today Shenzhen is the world’s third busiest container port, with a population with an average age of the less than thirty and almost entirely composed of recent migrants.

The invitation to participate in the Bi-City Biennale enabled the museum to engage with this fast-changing city and to road test the recently introduced Rapid Response Collecting strand. The museum asked more than sixty people in Shenzhen to propose a design object that told a story about their city and the result was an exhibition of twenty-three things and twenty-three stories about the place. By exhibiting everyday objects, the show placed centre stage the realities of urban life, of industry and of commercial and social change.

The Map for Makers was suggested by Kevin Lau of Seeed Studio who calls Shenzhen the ‘Maker’s Hollywood’. This first version of the map was created in three months, but Seeed hopes that as makers use it and find their own routes through Shenzhen, more information will be added. The aim is that it will eventually become a crowd sourced, comprehensive guide for makers to get the most out of one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the world.

The Shenzhen exhibition was the first opportunity to test Rapid Response Collecting. This new approach to collecting is intended to make museum collecting more responsive to global events, and to situate design in immediate relation to moments of political or social change. The museum opened its own space dedicated to Rapid Response Collecting in July 2014.