“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 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.

This body of work originates from the development of an advanced design-tech pipeline that redefines the way contemporary furniture concepts are generated, validated and transformed into prototyped artefacts. The process is conceived as a hybrid framework that integrates data-driven research, AI-assisted form exploration and parametric modelling, enabling a fluid transition from conceptual imagery to manufacturable 3D structures.

The workflow begins with an evidence-gathering phase, in which text-mining and visual analysis tools process large corpora of precedents, material logics, user requirements and emerging aesthetic signals. Instead of relying on trends filtered through intuition alone, the system extracts computationally verifiable patterns that inform the formal direction and structural logic of the project.

These insights are then translated into AI-generated 2D explorations, producing a wide field of visual hypotheses. The AI is used not as a stylistic patch or moodboard generator, but as an “ideation accelerator” capable of mapping the design space rapidly, exposing multiple variations and latent directions that would be too time-consuming to arrive at through traditional sketch-based iteration.

In the next stage, selected visual outcomes are reinterpreted inside a parametric modelling environment, where form, proportion and structural continuity are rebuilt from first principles. Here, geometry becomes programmable: relationships are embedded rather than drawn, enabling fabrication constraints, material behaviour and ergonomic feedback to be integrated early in the process.

Once validated computationally, the models move into rapid prototyping through 3D printing, allowing immediate physical testing of touchpoints, assembly logic and spatial presence. This bridge between digital and tangible output drastically reduces the number of design cycles required to reach feasibility, shortening the gap between concept and engineering.

The goal of the process is not merely to accelerate production, but to introduce a new organisational logic for design:

• requirements are incorporated upstream rather than “fixed later”;

• validation becomes computational rather than speculative;

• iteration becomes non-destructive and multi-branch;

• and manufacturability is embedded directly inside the creative act.

Through this method, a series of fluid and parametric furniture concepts has been developed — sculptural seats, continuous-surface tables, ultra-light components and hybrid furniture-architectures — each emerging from the same algorithmic logic of responsive form. The result is a family of designs that are not “styled” after the fact, but grown from structural intelligence, material behaviour and data-derived principles.

By consolidating research, ideation, modelling and prototyping into a unified pipeline, this design-tech process enables a significant reduction in development time and cost, while simultaneously increasing design precision and manufacturability. It is conceived as a future-facing approach to furniture innovation — one in which computational reasoning, parametric authorship and AI co-create a new spatial vocabulary for advanced material culture.

These design-technology processes form part of the ongoing research in advanced process design at the University of the Aegean, where Roberto Rota investigates how data-driven methods and generative AI can be integrated into the early phases of concept development. The research examines not only the technical outcomes of these new pipelines, but also their organizational implications: how workflows change, how roles are redistributed, and how design shifts from a linear sequence to a systems-based model of decision-making. Through this framework, the focus is on understanding how computational tools reshape the conditions of design practice, enabling new forms of agility, scalability and distributed fabrication, while redefining what it means to “design” within a post-industrial ecosystem.

In balance between contemporary and primitive, Wood.oo chair keeps the comfort of an armchair and the look of a wooden chair, exploring with shapes the possibilities given by plywood and CNC technology. As part of a mystical liturgy of nowaday daily life, it asks to be observed and touched within the framework of its living environment’s rituals…

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This collection of concept shoes — developed for both everyday wear and trekking contexts — originates from a broader research programme on data-driven design processes and distributed manufacturing systems. The work applies text mining, image analysis and AI-assisted form generation to define a new stylistic vocabulary for Generation Z, positioning footwear as an interface between cultural trends, material experimentation and parametric aesthetics.

The methodology begins with an extensive corpus analysis: hundreds of product references, trend documents, market images and semiotic cues were processed to extract underlying formal grammars, behavioural expectations and symbolic patterns. The system integrates target-oriented data analysis with AI-based generative synthesis, producing hundreds of candidate concepts that were subsequently narrowed down through computational filtering and selection criteria. Instead of relying on intuition alone, the workflow combines human intention with algorithmic evidence, allowing design directions to emerge from measurable signals rather than speculation.

This approach is aligned with the research conducted at the University of the Aegean, where the focus is on understanding how data-driven and AI-augmented methods are redefining not only the aesthetics of products, but the entire structure of design processes — from ideation and iteration to manufacturing strategy. The project also addresses the role of footwear as a distributed design category: a typology that can benefit from networked forms of production, local adaptation and parametric variation, supporting a post-industrial model of fabrication closer to ecosystems than to factories.

Within this framework, the research has generated three distinct families of concepts, each exploring a different articulation of form and material logic. The StoneBones series translates the morphologies of stone and bone into highly sculptural running shoes, where parametric curvature and mineral porosity become structural language rather than surface decoration. ColorHoles, by contrast, focuses on everyday wear: lightweight sneakers defined by organic perforations and Voronoi-like voids, where negative space acts both as an ergonomic device and as a playful stylistic signature.

Completing the set, Trekker introduces a collection of trekking shoes and short boots that hybridise multiple outdoor typologies, replacing mass with layered structural thinking to achieve protection, agility and adaptability in a single configuration.

Together, these collections illustrate how footwear design can evolve beyond stylistic interpretation into computational authorship, where the combination of design intelligence and machine-generated inference leads to new typologies that do not simply mimic nature or trend cycles, but derive from structured information flows. The result is a vocabulary of forms that is both contemporary and adaptive — conceived not as a final product, but as a platform for future manufacturing possibilities.

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.

“Bamboo Shovel and Litter+Kennel” are part of the project “Bamboo Pet Serie” designed by Ate Rote for the Fujian Bamboo Research Institute. The complete serie has been developed in collaboration with Artop-Shenzen which engineered and manufactured the prototypes. The has led to the exhibition at the Shenzen Design Week 2023.

The shovel can be folded through an ingenious detail. This litter box is completely disassembled and can alternatively be used as a kennel by inserting a cushion.

“Bamboo Shovel and Litter+Kennel” are part of the project “Bamboo Pet Serie” designed by Ate Rote for the Fujian Bamboo Research Institute. The complete serie has been developed in collaboration with Artop-Shenzen which engineered and manufactured the prototypes. The has led to the exhibition at the Shenzen Design Week 2023.

The shovel can be folded through an ingenious detail. This litter box is completely disassembled and can alternatively be used as a kennel by inserting a cushion.

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.