academice concepts are nearly useless in this world.

But, what we did intend with this article was to counter common black&white narratives such as the West is inherently innovative and creative and China is inherently not, or large institutions are inherently stifling creativity and informal organizations are inherently leading to new innovation. Changing something from within big institutions such as Microsoft or Tsinghua University is just as valuable and important as committing to start something very different and bottom-up. Neither is Tsinghua University or Fudan University, where I am currently at as a post-doctoral fellow, inherently less creative than a hackerspace, nor is every hackerspace ultimately creative. Working with both, an academic institution and a hackerspace in China, has taught me that there is not not only one single form of creativity and that we can’t simply assess with the same measurement tools the level of creativity across different social organizations, cultural practices and political structures. The goal of David and my article, then, was to start a conversation about what such an alternative approach towards understanding and enabling multiple forms of creativity can be, and how we can bridge across formal and informal organizations to do so and work together on this.

What is unique about hackerspaces, or at least about some of the hackerspaces I had the privilege to learn from and with in China, is that they actually manage to do both – to work both within and outside the system, challenging the status quo and simultaneously offering alternate solutions by re-using older structures, tools, and techniques and remaking them. But again, many people join hackerspaces for quite different motivations and as Gabriella Coleman has shown so illustratively in her work on hackers: there is multiple often conflicting narratives and interests at play, no single idea or narrative spans all hacker and maker efforts, some are more bottom-up and informal others less and more close to the institutional structures. And so hackerspaces seem to me a very good start in this effort, as environments that allow for multiple views to co-exist, negotiate, and then re-make.