Shenzhen Design Week

2023

A modular installation and collection of disassemblable products developed by Ate Rote and Artop Design for Shenzhen Design Week 2023.

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.

Bamboo Dumbbell

Bamboo Kettlebell

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.

Bamboo Pet-Food Boxes-Bowls

Bamboo Pet-Food Boxes-Bowls

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.

Bamboo Kennel

Bamboo Litter-Box

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.