The Shenzhen Design Week installation is the outcome of a research and concept design programme developed by Ate Rote and manufactured in collaboration with Artop Design Shenzhen. The project investigates the potential of bamboo as a material system in response to its current overproduction in China, studying how it can be reinterpreted through contemporary manufacturing to serve new product categories — particularly within the fitness and pet-care sectors.

The research explores bamboo not only as a traditional craft material, but as an industrial ecosystem, suitable for scalable and lightweight production. The installation itself is built from woven bamboo mats, reinterpreting classical Chinese fabrication techniques and unfolding them into large, folded sail-like surfaces that act as both spatial scenography and structural narrative. These modular textile-architectural forms celebrate bamboo’s flexibility while hinting at its latent architectural intelligence.

Parallel to the installation, a collection of prototype objects demonstrates how bamboo can replace heavier or less sustainable materials in everyday products. The pieces are conceived through Design-for-Disassembly principles: they rely on interlocking systems rather than screws or permanent joinery, allowing each component to be separated, repaired or recycled. The formal language is deliberately essential, favouring geometric clarity to facilitate mass production while integrating bamboo with metal or recycled plastics where necessary for performance and durability.

The resulting family of products includes fitness accessories — such as dumbbells, kettlebells and jump ropes — as well as pet-related designs including bowls, kennels, litter trays and small accessory tools. Together, the installation and product series demonstrate a model of lightweight, low-impact manufacturing that is both locally grounded in Chinese material culture and future-oriented in its approach to portability, sustainability and modular reuse.

The collaboration with Artop Design leverages this ecosystem as more than a supply chain: it becomes a living laboratory, where concept, engineering and fabrication form a single iterative loop. Instead of treating manufacturing as a downstream phase, the project integrates it as an early design driver — using the city’s prototyping capacity to explore new bamboo geometries, interlocking systems and reversible assembly techniques at a speed and precision unmatched elsewhere.

Shenzhen provides one of the most advanced manufacturing ecosystems in the world, where rapid prototyping, craft evolution and industrial scalability coexist within the same geography. Presenting the project within the framework of the Shenzhen Design Week means situating it inside this design-to-manufacture continuum, where material research can be translated directly into tangible production outcomes without losing its experimental nature.

Shenzhen’s role is therefore not merely logistical but cultural: it demonstrates how contemporary design can be co-developed with industry, allowing research to feed directly into applied innovation. This synergy enables alternative pathways for material futures — where sustainable resources like bamboo are reinterpreted through advanced processes while retaining their systemic intelligence.

“SoLong!” is an extendable and highly flexible sofa system composed of modular cushion + base units, designed according to Design-for-Disassembly principles.
Each module features a bent and laser-cut aluminum base – which can also function as an independent shelf – paired with a nautical-grade polyurethane cushion and a removable, washable fabric cover in flax and fire-retardant PES.
Despite its solidity, every element weighs just 1.5 kg, making the system effortless to transport, reconfigure, or store.

The project was presented in 2017 at Nilufar Depot in Milan, within a curated selection of works exploring new material approaches and reconfigurable furniture typologies. The space of the Depot — a hybrid between gallery, archive and architectural scenography — offered the ideal framework to highlight the system’s reversibility and spatial adaptability.

“SoLong!” was exhibited not as a fixed sofa, but as an open grammar of components: a sequence of light, reconfigurable units inviting the visitor to imagine multiple arrangements rather than a single definitive form. The installation emphasized mobility, modularity, and the idea of furniture as a dynamic presence capable of adapting to shifting domestic rituals.

Nilufar’s curatorial setting reinforced the dialogue between experimentation and craft, placing the piece in conversation with contemporary Italian design research while framing it as a conceptual investigation into weightlessness, disassembly, and nomadic living. The project was received as a forward-looking interpretation of seating typologies, anticipating today’s growing interest in ultra-light, repairable and re-scalable furnishings.

The project originates from a research path focused on Design for Disassembly, investigating how furniture can be conceived as a set of reversible relations rather than a fixed object. The search for ultra-light, transportable and easily installable components led to a constructive logic in which every part is separable, replaceable and repairable over time.

The use of nautical-grade polyurethane was not only a technical solution for durability and outdoor resistance, but also a conceptual gesture: its buoyancy makes the entire structure literally floatable, reinforcing the idea of furniture designed for movement, impermanence and spatial freedom. The removable and washable textile cover completes the cycle of reversibility by making maintenance simple and continuous.

The project draws inspiration from the designer’s experience of travelling across the Cycladic islands, where architecture and objects often remain light, temporary and adaptable to shifting conditions of use. “SoLong!” translates this Mediterranean culture of portability and assembly-in-situ into a contemporary seating system that privileges lightness, modularity and liberated forms of inhabiting.

The permanent exhibition at the Fujian Bamboo Institute presents the outcome of an ongoing collaboration between Ate Rote and Artop Design, exploring bamboo as a technological material rather than a merely traditional one. Within this context, Ate Rote developed a series of product concepts that translate research in material culture into tangible object typologies, while Artop engineered and manufactured the prototypes through an integrated industrial process.

The Fujian Bamboo Institute functions as a living archive of bamboo intelligence, where fabrication methods are exhibited along a continuum: from ancestral weaving and steam-bending practices to CNC machining, lamination, hybrid stamping and composite techniques. Visitors move through a pedagogical sequence that connects raw fibres to advanced structural assemblies, understanding bamboo not only as a resource but as an evolving platform of fabrication logics.

The prototypes on display demonstrate how contemporary product design can interface with these techniques to generate new applications. Several of the pieces — originally prototyped for the Shenzhen Design Week — are shown here alongside additional works developed specifically for the Institute, with a focus on fitness and pet-related products. These objects combine bamboo with recycled plastics and metal inserts, using forms that are intentionally minimal yet structurally expressive. Volumes are developed through cylindrical and spherical geometries to emphasise continuity, tactility and clarity of composition.

A key design principle in the collection is Design for Disassembly: no screws or permanent fixings are used, and every joint is engineered as a reversible connection. This allows the objects to be disassembled, repaired or recycled with zero destructive processes — demonstrating a blueprint for circular manufacturing that does not rely on complex infrastructures.

A selection of prototypes is presented in the exhibition, including a modular three-arm dumbbell, a kettlebell assembled through screw-less interlocking, a family of minimal, metaphysical-style portable bowls and containers, and a disassemblable cat hammock based on a tension-structure joint with no hardware. Each piece demonstrates how bamboo can be translated into contemporary product forms while retaining reparability, reversibility and material clarity.

The exhibition is organised through interactive and didactic pathways, where techniques, tooling processes and tactile samples are presented alongside the finished artefacts. Rather than isolating the product from its fabrication origin, the Institute stages the complete narrative: material extraction, transformation logic, constructive syntax and final use scenario all coexist within the same spatial experience.

This permanent display also forms part of a broader regional development strategy by the Fujian province, aimed at reinforcing bamboo as a competitive industrial resource for large-scale consumer markets. The programme supports the advancement of bamboo-based products across multiple sectors — including fitness, furniture, pet-care, hotel toiletries, tourism souvenirs and interior applications — promoting a fully integrated supply chain in which research, design and manufacturing operate in synergy to generate new economic and cultural value.

Free cage is an alluminium lamp presented at the Thessaloniki design week 2019. Designed according to harmonic principles, it is an interactive “internet of things” installation, technologically advanced and equipped with sound and position sensors. It changes colors and light intensity according to frequencies and vibration produced by the sound of a tibetan bell.