KOBAKANT is opening a tailor shop for electronic textiles and wearable technology in Berlin. Instead of speculating about a future in which tailor made technology is commonplace, we want to make this scenario a reality.
Besides providing the actual experience of visiting the shop and drawing upon its services, the project will produce documentation of the orders placed and realized in the shop. The KOBA Catalog will contain photos, interviews and accounts of the exchanges with customers, open-source patterns, circuit schematics and code. The physical artifacts produced in the shop will be documented in the catalog, but belong to the customers who ordered and paid for them.
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By running the KOBA Maßschneiderei as a subsidized small tailoring business we want to demonstrate that other types of industry/economy/production are possible. Tailors and carpenters have been working this way for hundreds of years, taking custom orders and making them a reality, providing to the community a realm of possibility. But while tailor shops and carpentry shops continue to exist, many of us never experienced a time where there was an electronics shop in town, with limited selection, where broken devices were fixed, where gadgets were disassembled on the counter… these kind of places that offer us possibilities, open up our imaginations.
Kobakant Manufaktur is more than a shop, it is a space where fiction can become fact, where we encourage customers to fantasize about features, talk about their relationship with gadgets, ask us questions to understand better the technologies that are about to become part of their everyday lives.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732098
