Malmö, Sweden
“Our mission is to turn toxic waste in form of electric scooters from the bottom of the canal into pieces of art,” says Oskar Olsson of Andra Formen.
Design collective Andra Formen presents the E-metabolism, a collection of table lamps, indoor garden systems, floor lamps, seating, and even a grill, all made of recycled electric scooters’ parts fished out of the canals of Malmö.
Working together with the diving organization Leva Livet, Andra Formen’s designers Christian Svensson, Jingbei Zheng, Peder Nilsson, and Oskar Olsson source the parts they need from the scooters, which come from a number of different companies.
The scooters used in the project were gathered from remote sections in or around the Malmö canal where they were discovered in various states of disrepair and no longer connected by GPS signal, “broken and without a functioning battery”.
Each designer created products that were connected to the type of design they usually do.
“We’ve all been doing similar projects before, working with the same process on our own projects, so we kind of had our own individual drive,” Nilsson says.
“We get different forms from different parts of the scooters, so we can have an initial idea in our minds of what to do with them and with other parts to better combine them into a domestic furnishing product,” Zheng adds.
Once Andra Formen decides which parts it wants to use, the studio fits the pieces together, sometimes adding 3d-printed connecting parts.
“Some parts are hard to remodel and then we 3D-scan them so that we get almost like a puzzle within the computer,” explains Olsson.
Each designer is responsible for a certain product category connected to the type of design they usually do.
The resulting products admittedly lean toward a recycled chic appearance, but certain pieces like the floor lamp and desk lamps reveal a greater bit of ragtag style evocative of the colorfully recycled soft goods from the Swiss brand, Freitag.
Project: E-Metabolism
Designers: Andra Formen
Designer Team: Christian Svensson, Jingbei Zheng, Peder Nilsson, and Oskar Olsson
