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Abstract: Unlike software designers, Internet of Things designers must negotiate global supply chains to realize their visions. By bringing a case study from open hardware design in Mexico, I show how technology trade policies—and trade policy in general—have shaped and will continue to shape computing designs and design practices (hardware, firmware, and software).
I draw on two and half years of ethnography in the Mexican Bajio, North America’s largest industrial corridor and an important site of global computing supply chains. At this site, new trade agreements offer small tech entrepreneurs, some of them open hardware developers and IoT designers, an opportunity to reorganize the distribution of current and future benefits, risks, and rights attached to private and State-supported technological projects. I show how information technology designers realize their devices at the intersection of trade policies, global supply chain volatilities and the materialities of the digital world.