Shared Lady Beetle is a stunning micro-lending library on wheels

Shared Lady Beetle is a project with a purpose. Bicycle enthusiasts are now all-too-familiar with the mountains of discarded bikes in countries such as China. The images, of bike share bicycles by the thousands, discarded in giant garbage sites elicit strong reactions. How can something so pure and wonderful as the humble bicycle create such an environment blight? That very question was something that LUO Studio in Beijing was grappling with when it designed a beautiful micro-library on wheels from castaway materials.

“Though born from the good intention of resources conservation, green commuting and making life more convenient, shared bicycles are becoming “monsters” under the unbridled commercial sprawl,” wrote Luo Yujie of Luo Studio of the inspiration for the project. “They have consumed plenty of industrial raw materials, encroached on scarce urban public space, and been dumped in horrible piles.”

The project, dubbed Shared Lady Beetle, was designed by LUO Studio principles Yujie and Lu Zhuojian.

Yujie questioned whether or not there was a better solution than what was happening presently.

“As a designer living in the city, I have been thinking about the possibility for friendly reuse of those abandoned bikes,” he wrote.

Yujie has a friend who specializes in maker education for children and had been wheeling his materials around in a grocery cart from school to school, and that was the inspiration he needed.

“Having seen this, I wanted to create a small and ingenious storage cart to support his maker education for kids,” Yujie states.

The project put to use an abandoned bicycle, discarded iron car sheets, and leftover materials of eco-friendly boards to design a mobile maker classroom for children.

“The goal was to make it creative, interesting and lively, and bring hope to reuse the industrial waste in a natural and artistic way,” he writes.

“The shared bicycle was transformed into a tricycle with large loading capacity, in order to display more items. To protect the items and avoid moving them repeatedly, we designed a special cover on the shelf, which drew inspiration from lady beetles, a type of beneficial insect that kids are familiar with. The way that lady beetles open and close wings were applied to the cover, appealing and creative.”

Although the Shared Beetle was designed as a maker classroom, it can function in many ways including as a micro-library for books that can be placed anywhere in the city where it is needed.

Shared bikes may have been abandoned across this city and many others, but put into the right hands, these can be repurposed with a little imagination and ingenuity.

“Urban development constantly creates new things, which may bring hope or cause great disappointment,” Yujie writes.

“Facing the unknown development in the city, we should stay positive, strive to change waste into treasure, and tackle changing situation responsively, so as to better take care of the city and the earth.”