Smiling by Chen Rui, China

2004: China.

Scale Model and Illustrations on Display at Michelin Challenge Design™

Biography:

CHEN Rui is a 23-year-old girl living in Shanghai, China. Currently, I am a student of Tongji University, majoring in industrial design.

My favorite thing is reading books, from serious to funny, from professional to romantic. You know, with books I can acquire anything available, which is useful to my design. To me, design means not an assignment or a work, but a game. Just like painting is the game for artists and melody for musicians, design is especially for me! Book is the most useful tool to play with it. There exist a headspring producing fun and imagination continuously.

As to the area of design, product design, landscape design and visual design are all my favor. They are correlating, communicating and interact to each other. The more expand you touch, the more deeply you can attach.

It’s a great pleasure for me to take part in Michelin Challenge Design. It is not only an honor to me, but also an encourage promoting me to go ahead further.

Description:

In the past few decades, China has rapidly developed in its economy and commerce, which gives birth to many pedestrian streets. On one hand, these streets are considered to be both shopping Eden’s and sightseeing destinations; therefore, they must have clean surroundings; on the other hand, people walking like streams can easily befoul these sightseeing-oriented streets. “Smiling”, a mobile vacuum cleaner , is both a working machine and a decoration for such pedestrian streets.

This cleaning auto has three functions: cleaning streets, emptying dustbins and watering. In its way of cleaning streets and emptying dustbins, I use the concept of “suction”. The slots at the bottom of the auto is used to suction the trashes on streets while the two pipes on the right side can be attached to dustbins and suction trashes directly from them without befouling the surrounding areas. The two pipes—for organic or inorganic objects respectively, then press scattered trashes into solids so that the space can be saved. Considering the fact that there is no need to water streets everyday, I decide to make it a space-convertible water-container on the upper side of the auto. The more the water is, the higher the ceiling will be, and vice versa. This changeable shape also adds to the pleasant outlook of the auto.