Bottom-Up Imaginaries: The Cultural-Technical Practice of Inventing Regional Advantage through IT R&D

Recent HCI research on social creativity and bottom-up innovation has highlighted how concerted efforts by the government policy and business communities to develop innovation ecosystems are increasingly intertwined with IT research and development. We note that many such efforts focus on cultivating regional advantage [20] in the form of innovation hubs that are situated in and leverage distinct sociocultural histories and geographies. Cultivating regional advantage entails achieving broad consensus about what that region’s advantage might be, that is, the construction of a regional advantage imaginary beyond the policies, IT supports, and practices to make it happen. Here, we document how an ongoing public debate among makers and manufacturers in Taiwan as a region—distinguished by direct engagement with design, fabrication, prototyping, and manufacturing processes—are proposing pathways toward a regional advantage that both reflects Taiwan’s recent sociocultural and economic histories and also its near future aspirations.