WORLD'S FIRST Recycled Electric Skateboard
Designed and developped in VIVA Lab
PET MINI Skateboard is a Open Source, Recycled Electric Skateboard for urban transportation. With the goal to end stressful commutes and boost your door-to-door speed with the perfect last mile recycled vehicle.
PET Mini Skateboard - How the idea was born?
HOW
By using the potential of Open Design we can easily prototype and distribute design’s at a global scale while promoting local manufacturing and problem solving. After getting the recycled plastic HDPE sheet’s from Precious Plastic, this get machined by a CNC router to obtain the skateboard deck. Mechanical parts were 3D printed to speed up prototyping phase, as the parts were manufactured at a local Fab Lab, VIVALab, so it can easily be replicated at any of the 1600 Fab Lab’s from the global FabLab network.
WHY
PET MINI was developed based on the growing importance of creating participatory approaches to design, with the growing access to digital fabrication tools through Fab Labs and information through the internet, the Maker and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movements are booming, we must rethink how we design and manufacture the products of the future through distributed approaches and bringing the user and industry closure to the design process.
The PET MINI is a constantly incomplete design, it’s incompleteness invites further evolution, it’s open philosophy generates community, it seeks to stimulate dialogue on the theme of development and circular economy – dialogues that invite designers to continuously rediscover new tools and materials that surround their environment, to stimulate a constant feeling of amazement by changing the way we perceive and understand our surroundings, setting up a connection to the problem and building a sense of meaning and purpose.
Technologies used
3D printing CNC milling Precious Plastic MachinesConcept & Product Development
It all started with two problems, the plastic waste I was seeing being gathered on the beaches of my home town Porto and the increasing commute times due to the high increase of people on the city and poor public and personal transportation infrastructures.
“As a design thesis for my Masters in Product & Industrial Design, I seeked to tackle this two problems through one project that could easily be open sourced as I felt more people around the globe also were eager to develop a solution to their local reality.”
With the help from VIVALab and the Precious Plastic team in Eindhoven, a project I’ve been collaborating since 2016, I started experimenting the use of recycled thermoplastics such as PP and HDPE. With this knowledge I designed and prototyped a electric skateboard that used the beauty of the recycled plastic transformed through digital fabrication tool’s.
Despite all the obstacles I’ve encountered throughout the project from burning electronics to CNC carving the skateboard decks to thin I was able to use this obstacles to my advantage and from them some unforeseen design solutions were able to emerge. In the end two electric skateboard decks were manufactured a fully recycled plastic version and a wooden/recycled plastic one.
Despite no PET was ever used during the development of the skateboard, due to it’s brittle nature and poor aesthetic results during test, this name was chosen precisely to stimulate the conversation around the use and types of recycled thermoplastics in the design process and simultaneously it serves as an acronym to “Personal Electric Transport”.
Download, Make your own & Share with the Community! It’s open source nature seeks to encourage other Designers & Makers to learn from the process and at the same time to turn it into a organic project that will evolve from the inputs of different people.
“Into what will it evolve to? Who knows?! It is up to you, the community to download it, remake it and re-share it at your own image defining it’s path…“