Hong Kong’s maker culture gets a serious boost with MakerBay’s official opening

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This past weekend, I was so glad to have attended the official opening of MakerBay, Hong Kong’s newest shared production space for hobbyist and inventors. MakerBay is the brainchild of Cesar Harada, an inspirational TED Senior Fellow and environmentalist. Cesar and his team are providing the much-needed space for makers in this crowded city with its prohibitively high rents. But more importantly, I think Cesar’s presence in Hong Kong will lift the local maker culture from mainly hobbyists to potentially a movement with a strong social impact.This is because Cesar’s own work as an environmentalist has focused on some very serious issues of the last decade: the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and radioactivity along Japan’s eastern coast after the earthquake and tsunami of 2011 resulting from the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. For the former, Cesar has been working on Protei, a novel, open sourced, oceanic cleaning drone; for the latter, he’s discovering ways to measure radiation levels across the Pacific Ocean. But as he states in his TED talks, there is still a lot of work to do on the environment.In an interview with the South China Morning Post this month, HK’s leading English language newspaper, Cesar stated that the maker culture has been slow to develop in Hong Kong. He points to the city’s ultra competitiveness where people tend to take advantage of each other instead of helping each other. Nevertheless, I think Hong Kong’s best asset is its social-economic openness. This makes it an ideal place for creative thinkers like Cesar Harada who will certainly raise the bar for the local maker community. In short, it’s going to be pretty exciting to see how MakerBay grows in the coming years to take the Hong Kong maker culture to the next level!