YUUE - Upcycling Shared Bicycle
Channel: YUUE design studio
Date: 2019-04-30

At present day, shared bicycle has become one of the most popular choices for traveling in the city. While bike sharing was originally intended to positively impact our environment, the highly competitive market soon turned the idea into an ecological disaster. For the chances to prevail rise with convenience and availability of their product the providers of shared-bikes rely on massive expansion especially in China.

When due to this strategy bicycles began piling up in Chinese metropolises to an extent where they were blocking streets completely, the Chinese city administrators started collecting abandoned bikes. They were then carried to landfills outside the cities which soon turned into bicycle graveyards. City administrators urged companies to take back their bikes and claimed a fee for the imposed removal. But with low cost production in China, a pick-up does not pay off to the investors who eagerly await to make their share. The shared-bike industry is since trapped in a vicious cycle.

Weng Xinyu of YUUE design studio became aware of the issue, he saw himself in the responsibility and felt compelled to take on the problem from a designer's perspective. By initiating this project, he wants to draw  public attention to the industry's flaw and offer an approach on how to generate a surplus by reusing the individual bike parts for furniture production and therefore making it worthwhile for the companies retrieving the bicycles that were towed away.

Unlike Recycling which converts products into raw materials for new productions, upcycling puts forward a new way of reducing waste. Old bicycle parts are accepted as they are. With as few modifications and extra parts added as possible, the old parts become new products. The life span of an old part is extended by being reborn as a new product.

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"Products can be owned by one, yet resources are shared by all" 

Since design booths are sold at a crazily high price that we are not able to afford, we had to find another way of exhibiting our project. Since bicycle is closely associated with traffic and street, we wanted to show our project on the street. Guerrilla exhibition is born.

As we were looking for a rent truck, a tipper truck popped into our eyes. It turns out to be a perfect option, because a tipper truck is often used to dump waste. While this time we were dumping something really valuable. Once tipped at at precarious angle, the furniture is about to fall down, eyewitnesses of the exhibition will grasp the metaphor we mean. 

Weng Xinyu believes that products can be owned by a customer or a company, yet resources are shared by all of us. Production beyond demand with the goal of occupying more market share is really harmful. Any company with the ability to mass-produce something should also possess the ability to handle the aftermath. Without a social responsibility, these giants will only pull the whole society into disaster. At the same time, every participant of the society is entitled to criticize, this also includes designers.


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YUUE design studio
yuuedesign.com