Maker bar Taipei is located on Jinshan South Road in a building the Taipei City Government plans to demolish next spring as part of an urban regeneration program. The 33-square-meter “bar” includes a large open area where members can work independently or in groups, and a separate conference room.
A makers’ paradise
The coworking space operates on a membership system that charges ordinary members NT$2,000 per month and students just NT$750 per month. It also offers day passes for NT$300.
It has ten members who visit on a regular basis, including staff of an online learning platform called Hahow and of a digital architectural design firm, as well as other workers who visit less frequently. Maker bar’s owners also lease the space out for classes, and work with other organizations to offer classes on subjects such as the Arduino platform, 3D printing, and welding.
The owners themselves—Kamm Kai Yu, Jason Hsu and Monica Shen—are all in their early 30s. Kamm, who holds a master’s degree in architecture from National Chiao Tung University, says that the school provided students with access to 3D printers, laser cutters, and other tools in its studio. It therefore seemed natural to him to orient Maker bar around the use of such tools, and to establish a client base of hardware and platform designers.
Shen says that she originally envisioned people who already knew how to use tools coming into Maker bar every day to build things. But when she and her partners noticed that most of the groups that came in were developing websites, they realized that there simply weren’t that many hardware development teams, and that industrial designers and startup groups usually had their own facilities.
An online learning platform
Hahow, a young team consisting of six National Taiwan University alumni, has been using Maker bar to develop and manage its online learning platform.
“Our platform is the first to bring a funding mechanism to online videos,” says Hahow cofounder and president Arnold Chiang. He says that as a university student, he felt that Taiwan made it tough to study subjects outside your major. People in humanities programs couldn’t learn to build websites without changing majors, starting their university careers over, or taking classes at an expensive tutoring center. “But the fact is that we’re surrounded by people who can do different things. There had to be some way to learn from them inexpensively.” The idea behind Hahow was creating a platform to make that possible.
Would-be teachers need to find somewhere to teach. Would-be students have scheduling and location constraints. Hahow solves the problems of both.
In addition, the platform lets teachers set rates based on their costs and the value of their courses. YouTube used to be almost the only place to put videos online, and pays uploaders the same NT$30 per 1,000 clicks no matter what the value of their content or the cost of creating it. “But we thought many people would be willing to pay a reasonable price to be shown what they want to learn,” says Chiang
Hahow’s platform also enables interaction. “In the past, web teachers probably weren’t very clear about what students wanted to learn. Hahow enables them to find out in advance and revise their curricula accordingly.”
How does Hahow work? Would-be teachers shoot a three-minute-long introduction to their proposed course. They then post this video on Hahow to gauge the level of interest, setting a price and a target number of students for the course based on their costs and their estimate of the value of their content. Once their proposal achieves a given level of funding, they shoot and upload the course.
A woman pursuing a master’s degree in the UK shot her intro in a UK museum that permits photography. Setting a price of NT$288 per class and a target of 30 students, she quickly met her objectives, and uploaded her course videos on schedule in May.
Hahow launched in February 2015, and by early May had more than 600 courses on topics ranging from building a website, creating illustrations, and writing a resume in English to illustrating recipes and learning to be a DJ.
“I hope that someday everyone who wants to learn something will visit Hahow.” But Chiang knows that starting a business is tough. His current team are unpaid, yet work daily at Maker bar from 10 a.m. until midnight. Fortunately, the space is large, inexpensive, and filled with opportunities to meet interesting people, professionals in a variety of fields, all of which is very helpful to a startup.
“Open source” and “collaborative”
Maker bar’s appeal is clear: it offers local entrepreneurs and makers space, tools, and access to resources.
Shen argues that coworking spaces increase members’ chances of being seen and gaining access to resources, explaining that venture capitalists often visit looking for projects and that the government also occasionally offers funding.
Maker bar’s core values are centered on open-source and collaborative design.
What does “open source” mean? Safecast, a global open-source radiation-sensor network assembled in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, provides an excellent example.
Kamm explains that the team that developed Safecast worked together from locations all over the world, with someone in New York designing the program, someone in London designing the components, and so on. Their collective efforts were then revised, refined and completed online.
The Open Design City project, a 2014 collaboration between Maker bar and the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), provides another example. The six designers selected for the project considered Taipei’s issues and its urban design, addressing questions such as how the city could be more bicycle friendly. They gathered input on people’s problems, designed potential solutions to them, then put their designs online where people could download and 3D print them.
The DCA also subsidized a “maker map” program that details where people can buy materials and work them into products, basically sketching the maker ecosystem to make it easier for outsiders to give “making” a try.
Kamm says that Taiwanese industry built itself through contract manufacturing. Now that much of that manufacturing is done offshore, our remaining onshore factories have the opportunity to use low-volume production as a vehicle for transformation. “People outside of Taiwan probably don’t realize that we have the capability to do this. Even if they do know, they probably don’t know how to take advantage of it.” The maker map will change that. “Once the map is complete, we’ll make it available to everyone online. “
A great choice for “nomads”
The Internet has changed many things, including the way many people work. Freed from the need to go into the office every day, many people have chosen to take up a more nomadic style of work.
The Nomad List, a website that caters to such workers by providing relevant information on cities around the world, rated Maker bar Taiwan’s best workspace. “Foreigners like our space because it’s more open,” says Shen.
For all that Taiwan has seen numerous coworking spaces open in recent years, demand for their services remains sparse. “Where are the people who need these spaces?” Shen thinks that Taiwan doesn’t have enough local freelancers to support its plethora of coworking spaces, and argues that they must attract foreign workers to have a chance of succeeding. “The places with vibrant coworking scenes, which include Shenzhen and cities in Thailand and Japan, all have a large, active foreign community.”
Shen says that Taiwan could bring foreign makers flocking to Taiwan by making it easier for them to start businesses here and by resolving their residency issues. Taiwan’s friendly atmosphere and Taipei’s low cost of living relative to much of urban Asia make the city a great place to start a business.
Foreign maker tenants would help support work spaces, and inject them with the maker spirit. That, in turn, would nourish local makers and help give rise to an innovative local “making” ecosystem.
Maker bar founders Monica Shen (far right) and Kamm Kai Yu (second from right) with the Hahow team, themselves Maker bar tenants.
Maker bar allows tenants to rent and use a variety of “making” tools, including 3D printers and laser cutters.
A robotic “bartender” built by a Maker bar tenant.
Coworking spaces enable workers from different fields to rub shoulders, which often sparks new ideas.
Laser cutting results in its own unique aesthetic.
