Exclusive | Hong Kong’s makers join global group of Star Trek-like replicators

On Tai Nan Street in the working class district of Sham Shui Po, you’ll find Common Room, a small shop with the look of a trendy coffee bar.

Common Room does serve coffee, but it’s also equipped with laser cutters, a 3D printer and all the tools and computer design equipment needed to make your own artisan items.

Common Room is a so-called maker space, containing all that’s needed for inventors and designers to come up with their own unique products. The maker movement is the collection of entrepreneurs, builders, spaces and equipment around the world, united by the common passion to personalise and create new things.

Common Room’s founder Keith Lam wants his maker space to complement the neighbourhood and its array of old-school customisation shops.

To the untrained eye, Common Room – or other maker spaces in Hong Kong – wouldn’t seem like the starting points of a new world order in the economics of production.

But in the eyes of Dr Neil Gershenfeld, Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor and founder of the Centre for Bits & Atoms (CBA), this and other maker spaces around the world herald a new, more personalised economy.

Gershenfeld, whom T he New York Times dubbed “the intellectual godfather of the maker movement”, is known to readers of Wired or MIT Technology Review, and a regular of TED talks. A discussion about the future of production with Gershenfeld can span the Italian Renaissance to a not-too-distant future, in which Star Trek-style replicators can conjure up virtually any product you ask of it.