COPENHAGEN, DENMARK – Research and design lab SPACE10 launched a project to restore the balance between people and planet, and it’s opening the initiative to anyone in world who wants to join in.
Teaming up with tech-driven design studio Bakken & Bæck and the interior and product designers from Tanita Klein, SPACE10 took off with World Bee Day on May 21 and released the open-source design for “Bee Home.”
Bee Home is exactly what its name suggests, a place bees can stay and call their home. This is to address the nearing extinction of bees, which would ultimately result to our own lifestyles being heavily impacted as 90 percent of all flowering plant species in the world rely on animal pollinators (…fun fact!), which includes roughly one-third of the world’s food supply, according to the Space10 team.
“Bee Home explores how we can inspire people to solve this global challenge in a playful and accessible way. Through a digital platform that allows anyone to design, customize, and download their own Bee Home, we hope to offer a vision of how democratic design can help rebalance our relationship with the planet,” the team stated on the project microsite.
This initiative is aimed at providing shelter for solitary bees, the “most prolific pollinator you’ve probably never heard of.”
Out of the over 20,000 bee species all around the world, the majority of these are solitary, which means that unlike honeybees, they don’t live in hives or produce honey. These bees are perfectly content with living by themselves, spending their days gathering pollen, and collecting food for their next generation of offspring. Moreover, one solitary bee can provide as much pollination as 120 honeybees. Female solitary bees also give birth to 20-30 offspring.
And so the design for Bee Home was born — considering local fabrication and sustainability, the modular design requirement to make customization possible, accessibility with a “spine and key” system that doesn’t require tools of any kind in assembling, and most importantly, what the bees need – resulting to a product that’s, pun intended, the bee’s knees.
Anyone in the world can come in and design their own Bee Home on the microsite. Once they’re satisfied with the blueprint, they can download it and take it to the nearest local maker-space to produce it locally, and then place the bee home wherever they want.
As the Space10 team stated, “Bee Home is an open invitation for everyone to give bees the space they need — and to make sure the planet we all call home thrives in the process.”
Head on over to https://www.beehome.design/design to create your own bee home design
