Keywords

1 Introduction

In the context of the information age, the advanced information and media technologies have broken the boundaries of time and space, greatly shortened the distance between countries. The globalization of economy, technology, and culture makes each country depend on and promote each other. In addition, driven by information technology, innovation has become the mainstream of the development of the times. The traditional innovation model has gradually transformed into an Innovation 2.0 model centered on mass innovation and open innovation. In the first two backgrounds, the exchanges and collisions of different cultures are becoming more and more intense. Nowadays, how to balance and coordinate this situation, and achieve co-creation and win-win cooperation among different countries has been a hot research direction.

The concept of maker space is constantly expanding, and its interaction space has changed from physical space to regional virtual space, which gives more possibilities for interaction forms and methods. Based on the characteristics of openness and innovation of Makers, we boldly propose a new cross-cultural online maker space, that is, a maker platform for multi-national collaborative innovation, so as to mobilize the vitality of the whole “global village” to realize the sustainable innovation of human civilization.

2 Concept of Online Maker Space

2.1 Overview of Maker Space

Maker space refers to a kind of socialized innovation platform. It can realize creative sharing and cross-border cooperation by providing service platform for communication, open physical space, equipment and resources needed for creative practice, so as to promote the practice and productization of creative inspiration. In the second half of the 20th century, the emergence of the third scientific and technological revolution brought mankind into the information age. And the wave of globalization, technology and interconnection gave birth to the maker movement. In 1981, “chaos computer club” was born in Berlin, Germany, and became the first maker space recognized in the world. Since then, maker space has sprung up. In addition, the emergence of new technologies such as computing design, 3D printing and open-source hardware also provides effective support for the realization of creativity, thus promoting the development of maker space.

With the development of Internet technology, the main body and mode of innovation are constantly changing. Scientific and technological innovation projects are gradually turning into user centered Innovation 2.0 mode. Therefore, the concept of maker space has changed, from the original small group of maker movement to mass innovation. In addition, maker space breaks through the shackles of physical space, expanding into an online and offline integrated space combined with virtual space.

2.2 Challenges of Maker Space

At this stage, maker space is in the period of transformation and development, and the difficulties and challenges faced by different regions are also different. As far as China is concerned, based on the investigation of the more developed Yangtze River Delta region and the more backward western region in China, the challenges faced by maker space mainly include two aspects.

On the one hand, the field equipment of maker space is not in place, and the capital investment is insufficient. The development of maker space needs to pay a lot of costs, including venue leasing, equipment purchase, operation management, etc. The shortage of funds is mainly due to the lack of effective operation organization mode. Relying on government subsidies and members’ financial contributions alone, not only the makers’ dreams cannot be realized, but also maker space itself will face the problems of unsustainable profits and scale expansion.

On the other hand, it is the imbalance of regional development and the shortage of human resources. The development of maker space is closely related to the participation of top talents. Compared with the eastern Yangtze River Delta, the economic development of Western China is backward and the environment for innovation and entrepreneurship is poor. So talent flow tends to the East. In addition, from the perspective of overall development, the number and diversity of senior makers, management talents and talents in other fields are also lacking, the public awareness of innovation has not really formed, and the multi-agent interaction mode has not been realized.

In addition, maker space also faces copyright issues, system maintenance issues, etc. How maker space can achieve sustainable development remains to be further explored.

2.3 Cross-cultural Online Maker Space

Based on the development of maker space model and the problems faced, the establishment of online platform becomes the key to realize the sustainable development of maker space. With the development of science and technology, the arrival of big data, cloud computing, 5G, blockchain and other innovative technologies has given a new mode of innovation and entrepreneurship. The mode of maker space dominated by physical space will be transformed into a new mode of regional linkage dominated by virtual space. Due to the existence of online platforms, we can further establish distributed maker space [1], reduce operating costs and optimize resource utilization through the sharing and collaboration of small maker space and central maker space.

As mentioned above, the concept of online maker space referred to in this paper is no longer limited to maker activities, but “mass innovation”. Based on the current upsurge of globalization, this paper boldly proposes the cross-cultural online mass innovation space, which can further expand the diversity of the main body of mass innovation, link the vitality of the whole “global village” to achieve innovation projects, and even solve global problems. At the same time, it can promote the interaction between different cultures to the greatest extent, achieve the aesthetic common of psychological space and virtual space, and facilitate the harmonious and stable development of “global village”.

3 Overview of Cross-cultural Studies

3.1 Comparative Study of Cultures

On the cultural level, it is particularly important to solve the obstacles of cultural differences for the construction and sustainable development of maker space. The concept of culture is very extensive, so far scholars all over the world do not have a unified concept to define it. Cultural differences can be explained from horizontal and vertical dimensions.

First of all, in the horizontal dimension, the cultural differences between the East and the west not only include the semantic differences, but also the aesthetic, physiological and psychological differences. For example, avoiding uncertainty, the West pays attention to the logic of thinking and rejects ambiguity. The East, however, tends not to speak thoroughly and prefers to leave some room or room for reflection, which may cause cultural misunderstanding and hinder the process of global co-creation.

Secondly, in the vertical dimension, the pace of cultural change and change is faster and faster. As for China, there will be new annual buzzwords on the Internet every year, such as “OMG, buy it” in 2019, reflecting the outbreak of social e-commerce in China. Design has evolved organically with cultural changes. In the era of low human civilization, human beings mainly pay attention to physical or physiological needs and design sickles, houses, etc. With the development of technology and society, human beings begin to pay attention to the design of reason, reason, ethics and other aspects. On this basis, human beings reflect on the relationship between man and nature, and pay attention to the design of the unity of man and nature. Human civilization and discovery and invention promote each other and complement each other. Exploring the change of culture in time provides the basis for social development.

Culture is the best entry point to study different social civilization, while the intersection of time and space is the empathy of human cross-cultural communication, that is, cultural commonality.

3.2 Cross-culture Study

According to the definition of culturology, cross-culture refers to the interaction between two or more cultures, across the national boundaries. This paper holds that the development of human civilization has always been homologous and symbiotic, and cross-culture is a key step in cultural integration. So it is feasible and necessary to integrate cross culture into online mass innovation platform.

From a macro perspective, as a community of shared destiny, all kinds of civilizations have something in common. For example, the natural concept of slow design in northern Europe coincides with that of Zen in China. We can use the development of audio-visual art to simulate the evolution of different social civilizations. After thousands of years of development and evolution, plastic arts and music arts have gradually formed different complex categories, but based on the similarity and primitivism of early human society, they always have the common aesthetic principles, that is, the ecological view of the unity of man and nature.

From a micro perspective, in today’s globalization, social mobility makes the collision and integration of culture reach a climax. Therefore, design should not be limited to and centered on the domestic user experience, but should put cross-cultural communication at the front of design, design with international thinking, and interact with different cultures in adaptability and complementarity. Through this method, on the one hand, it can reduce the impact of cultural differences on product audiences, on the other hand, it can reduce the impact of cultural change on product life cycle, and improve the cultural added value of products.

Cross-culture can be embodied in human language, aesthetics, values, ways of thinking and communication. In order to analyze all kinds of culture, many studies have put forward different cultural psychological models. For example, Choong et al. [2] divide culture into four dimensions when designing cross-cultural web pages, including cognitive dimension, emotional dimension, perceptual dimension and functional dimension. The perceptual dimension includes the use of metaphor, and the functional dimension includes uncertainty avoidance. This paper divides culture into two levels. One is the external level, which refers to people’s most intuitive feelings of cultural differences, including language, time zone, currency, etc. The other is the internal level, which mainly emphasizes the harmony of human psychological space, including aesthetics, metaphor, logic, communication mode, etc.

4 Design Strategies of Online Maker Space System

In this paper, the method of sustainable interactive design is used to ensure the sustainability of the system. Through the research of cross-cultural system, three community platforms of cross-cultural online maker space system are put forward innovatively:

4.1 Sustainable Interaction Design

Sustainable interactive design ensures the sustainability of the system through interactive design thinking, including the sustainability of environment, society, culture and economy. The significant trend of design development is the improvement of user participation. In the past, the traditional designer monopolized the design, gradually appeared the user customization, and then to the current trend of experience economy, all told us that the future of design must be user-oriented. On the one hand, the cross-cultural online maker space provides new opportunities for product innovation through the cultural diversity of participants, so that the product can be iterated organically. On the other hand, cultural and social sustainability can be achieved through cultural exchanges. How to realize the sustainable system of cultural empowerment design and management of mass innovation platform, and how to gather and coordinate the cross-cultural innovation power are the topics of this paper.

Interactive technology drives the development of open innovation, which lays the foundation for global communication, mass innovation and instant interaction. In order to solve the impact of cultural differences on the operation of online maker space and realize the social sustainability of the system, the international and inclusive goals should be taken in the system development. Mustaquim et al. [3] proposed an inclusive innovation framework (IIF) designed to achieve sustainable development goals. The design mainly improves the overall user satisfaction through simple and flexible use, easy to perceive and understand the system and low physical requirements, so as to achieve sustainability. Through the combination of multi-media and multi-mode, the new interaction technology enhances the system’s inclusiveness and facilitates the use of cross-cultural users.

4.2 Cross-cultural System Design

As mentioned above, deep-rooted cultural differences can easily lead to cultural misunderstanding among users, so cross-cultural systems need to design effective mechanisms to alleviate this contradiction. Day [4] divides the consideration of cultural factors in system design into three levels: Globalization (emphasizing the objectivity of culture, ignoring the subjective factors), internationalization (reducing the influence of cultural symbols, improving the internationalization), localization (catering to the needs of different cultural groups). Based on the fact that the cross-cultural online maker space is still in the initial stage of development, this paper proposes to design the cross-cultural system internationally, only considering the external level of culture, so as to improve the universality of the system. During system operation, big data is used to explore the internal characteristics of different cultures, so as to realize localization and improve the adaptability of the system to different cultures.

In the international design of cross-cultural system, the translation of different languages, time zone and currency annotation should be considered in the interface design. In addition, the design should try to maintain cultural neutrality and avoid culturally sensitive factors such as racial discrimination. Localized design is the goal of cross-cultural systems to make products suitable for specific cultural groups. In the process of accumulating the internal characteristics of different cultures, we can adopt the method of identifying “cultural markers”. Cultural markers were put forward by Barber and Badre [5] in 1998, which means the most accepted and expected interface design elements of cultural groups in specific regions. In other words, cultural markers are the embodiment of cultural internal characteristics, including color, logic, metaphor, etc. Through the collection and accumulation of big data on cultural markers, we can further iterate the system and integrate specific cultural markers into the system design.

4.3 Design Strategies of Cross-cultural Online Maker Space Ecosystem

The sustainable online maker space needs to build an innovation ecosystem with the characteristics of self-growth, self-profit and self-repair. Therefore, the cross-cultural online maker space can be divided into education community, inspiration community and innovation community.

At the level of educational community, on the one hand, maker education can rely on Colleges and universities to carry out formal curriculum education and research; on the other hand, it needs to pay attention to interdisciplinary, creative practice, experience education, etc., so as to cultivate open and innovative talents. Formal courses can be combined with steam Education (Science, technology, engineering, art, Mathematics) to improve students’ interdisciplinary innovation ability. In addition, maker education is inseparable from practice. The establishment of education system can work closely with universities, enterprises and governments to realize the socialization of maker education. While teaching practice, educational community can also promote the development of innovative community. The innovation community can provide projects to the education community in the form of crowdsourcing, and the makers can provide a lot of creativity to the initiators through project practice, so as to realize a virtuous circle.

At the level of inspiration community, it is mainly user-centered to share knowledge and creativity of cross-cultural or interdisciplinary groups. First of all, it is necessary to reduce the threshold of communication, provide a platform for resource sharing, further integrate big data space based on communication data, mix and edit different cultures, and intelligently analyze the different semantic systems, aesthetic concepts, and thinking modes of people from different cultural backgrounds. Through the collection and classification of cultural markers, we can find the common genes of culture on the basis of exploring the cultural differences of different countries. Secondly, we can further design the physiological and psychological level through big data, such as building personalized interaction interface according to different behavior habits, or building symbol semantic database, integrating different cultural meanings, promoting cultural identity, so as to promote cross-cultural communication. Finally, we can explore multisensory experience interaction, from hearing, touch, smell and so on, to promote the maximization of communication mode and experience.

At the level of innovation community, the first thing is to have an open-source platform to provide makers with design tools, software and hardware, project library, etc. Next is the project management system. One is to have good ecological information guidance, realize the rational allocation of information resources, and encourage users to carry out cross-cultural design or join the cross-cultural design team. The second is the project schedule management system, which can track and monitor the project and protect the privacy. Finally, we need to have reflection and evaluation mechanism, online tracking and calculation of design process and problems, and dynamic system design based on the comprehensive feedback of users. The extensible interactive Modular Simulation (SIMS) proposed by Ferrara [6] is a kind of sustainable design model based on sharing. Based on this, users can develop their own design and give full play to their innovation ability. The project community can refer to the Sims model for user guidance. Based on the generation design of SIMS, which is mainly based on the recombination elements, the future research needs to further explore the user independent innovation system and cross-cultural cooperation system.

5 Technical Support of Cross-cultural Online Maker Space

With the development of science and technology, the construction of online maker space ushered in significant opportunities. Based on 5G and blockchain, this paper creatively proposes the following technical support points for cross-cultural mass creation.

First of all, 5G’s characteristics of high data transmission rate and low delay level facilitate the real-time transmission of big data, high-definition video and even virtual reality. So it can provide technical support for information exchange and supervision and management of cross-regional projects. In addition, the large network capacity of 5G can meet the real-time connection scenarios of massive equipment, such as telemedicine projects and radio-controlled industrial manufacturing projects. Combined with artificial intelligence, the innovation system can be mobile, data-based, collaborative and intelligent, and then the software and hardware system of maker space will be combined to transition from digital maker space to intelligent maker space. Last but not least, users will generate a lot of data during the use of the platform, which is not only conducive to the system iteration, but also can depict user profiles in different countries according to user data. Therefore, based on the construction of a universal platform, differentiated content services can be provided.

In addition, as a research hotspot at this stage, the characteristics of blockchain, such as decentralization, openness, independence and security, coincide with the concept and demand of online maker space. Through the blockchain’s distributed ledger technology, project personnel in different position and regions can jointly complete data recording, greatly improving the efficiency of cooperation. Besides, they can jointly participate in the supervision of the project. In addition, using an appropriate consensus mechanism can allow project partners reach a consensus, identify the reliability and effectiveness of project records, and provide a foundation of trust for cross-cultural stakeholders. Based on these reliable data records, smart contract technology can automatically implement some consensus rules and terms in the process of the project, making the interactive innovation of online maker space efficient and transparent. In addition, using intelligent contract and blockchain technology to realize cross organization RBAC mechanism [7], that is, according to the roles of different users to control their access to certain services, so as to enhance the flexibility and security of the platform.

6 Conclusion

With the academic support of cultural commonality and the technical support of 5G and blockchain, the development of cross-cultural online maker space is necessary and feasible. This paper divides cross-cultural maker space into education community, inspiration community and innovation community, so as to make the system more orderly and sustainable. This system can provide a platform for resource sharing, and promote people’s cultural identity in the virtual space and psychological space, based on the mixed editing of different cultures by big data. Furthermore, it can also realize the creation, implementation, management and supervision of transnational design projects, provide new opportunities for global innovation, and ultimately achieve sharing, co-creation and win-win results.