IKEA’s research and design lab SPACE10 has created a new open source Bee Home. Working with Bakken & Bæck and designer Tanita Klein, the team has launched the free Bee Home project to coincidence with the United Nations International Bee Day. The project takes advantage of digital fabrication and parametric design so that people can design and fabricate their own Bee Home locally.
As the team states, "Bees are essential for all life on our planet—including one third of all the food we eat —but bees are under increasing threat of extinction due to human impact. That’s why SPACE10 wants to make it easy for anyone, anywhere to design a beautiful home for this vital animal." Kaave Pour, Director of SPACE10, said that, "For almost 80 years, IKEA has enabled people to create a better everyday life at home. But our home is more than just four walls— our home is also the planet we live on. That is why we launch Bee Home: we want to enable people everywhere to help rebalance our relationship with the planet and ensure a sustainable home for all of us.”
You can design your own Bee Home based on predefined parameters: you can select the size, height and visual expression, but also how it will be placed, from a rooftop and backyard to a balcony space. Myles Palmer, Project Lead at Bakken & Bæck, said that, "To reconnect with the many bees in our environment, we need to give back what we have taken from them: their homes. By designing new interactive experiences, we can create a more sustainable manufacturing process for doing so: one that is truly open-sourced, informed by local living and customizable for many contexts and uses.”
“I want people to design a dream home for bees that provides the perfect environment for their offspring, while at the same time being incredibly easy to design, assemble and place. It was important for me that Bee Home is aesthetically pleasing and almost feels like you’ve added a sculpture to your garden or your balcony. This project really exemplifies how design can do good for both people and their environment" said designer Tanita Klein.
News via SPACE10
