Even though Vienna’s waste management agency, the MA 48, according to their own information, is collecting around 2500 abandoned bicycles within the city borders per year, it has turned out to be unbelievably difficult to get hold of any. Once an object has been officially qualified as “trash” (meaning: ended up in a dumpster – which is quite self-evidently always owned by someone – or simply being touched by official “waste management” personnel it seems) it is near to impossible to declassify it as such, and save it from being burnt, shredded, or melted back into undefined formless matter.

“In fact, it has been shown that over 70 percent of the total waste generated in Germany is held as fractions in technological processes (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2015b). However, the ambitious, technological goals of the circular economy have led to a strong separation between the individual and the institutional level.
The established waste system with its regulations can therefore also be perceived as a closed “waste regime” (Gille, 2007, 9; Reno, 2009, 21).“*

Ritzmann, S. and Birkhäuser Verlag (2018) Wegwerfen, Entwerfen : Müll im Designprozess – Nachhaltigkeit in der Designdidaktik, p. 32. Basel.

But we might have finally found a loop-hole and also possible other sources; so Lukas and I won’t have to go “Bonnie & Clyde” to get us a sample set. And this is our first legally aquired specimen:

In the meantime we have started our first studies on an arbitrary set of virtually generated bike-frames in order to find assembly strategies and rules for aggregating spatial bike-frame structures. Bike-frame geometries are manifold and vary across their use-case areas and body-size of their intended users.

However, imagining an possibly even infinite sized set, these variations could be kept to a minimum. Therefore we simplified the problem and started with one idealized prototypical bike frame:

During the first study we looked at possible 2D and 2.5D patterns that could be formed solely by translations and mirroring, regarding the frame as an “edge-typology“.

Based on this single part type the next directive was to find compact spatial (triangular and tetrahedral) cells to then be able to aggregate these unedited into larger structural assemblies, purely based on the inherent axes and connection logic of a bike frame itself. As per usual we worked in parallel on digital studies (manual and with Wasp) and with (more intuitive) physical models.

Further investigations with the Grasshopper 3d Plug-in “Wasp” (developed by our team member Andrea Rossi) led us to cell types and aggregations:

But as with everything idealized: “as soon as the real world enters, everything becomes special and nothing works anymore…” (profound words from supposedly Frieder Nake).

Why? Find out here.

*Gille, Z. (2007). From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History. The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Reno, J. (2009). Your Trash is Someone’s Treasure. The Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfill. Journal of Material Culture, 14 (1), 29-46.