Arduino Holding is a computer hardware and software company which produces microcontroller kits. It began in 2005 as a teaching tool to make coding and electronics accessible to a wider audience. By empowering people to design, Arduino helped usher in a wave of DIY enthusiasts commonly referred to as the ‘Maker Movement’.
The initial Arduino core team consisted of Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, and David Mellis, who began work on the project in 2005 at the Interaction Design institute Ivrea (IDII), in Ivrea, Italy.

The first Arduino microcontroller board was produced in 2005 as a modest tool for Massimo Banzi’s students at the IDII. Banzi was interested in creating a device that was cheap and powerful enough for his students to realise the projects they were interested in. At the time, a device called the BASIC Stamp was commonly used for interaction design, but it was relatively expensive ($100 US), it did not have enough computing power, and did not run on Macintosh. Banzi and his team then aspired to make a version of this platform that was even more affordable and easy to use, resulting in the Arduino. Banzi named the microcontroller after a bar nearby to IDII which he used to frequent.

This microcontroller is the third major revision of the Arduino development platform and consists of a USB microcontroller based on the ATmega328P chip and the Arduino IDE and is a surface mounted device (SMD), a method of mounting components directly on the surface of printed circuit boards (PCBs).

This Arduino Uno R3 was acquired as part of the Shekou Project, an international partnership between the V&A and China Merchant Shekou Holdings (CMSK) to open a new cultural platform called Design Society in Shekou. The Arduino Uno R3 was included in the inaugural exhibition, ‘Values of Design’, in the V&A Gallery at Design Society as an example of how objects can communicate through their design to help make data and information more legible.