Design is not just about creating products to sell and buildings to live in. Many designers are now looking past the traditional forms of design and architecture, and exploring design’s potential to positively impact the world in other ways. This includes how design can help rebuild habitats for bees and other pollinating insects whose natural homes have been destroyed or degraded by humans.
In The Netherlands, Matilde Boelhouwer has turned her research and design skills to reversing the drastic decline in insect population in urban environments. As part of her project Insectology: Food for Buzz, she collaborated with university researchers, scientists and engineers to design five different artificial flowers that can be installed in any urban environment to provide an emergency food source for bees and other insects.
Each of the five flowers was designed for the ‘big five’ of pollination: bees, bumblebees, hoverflies, butterflies and moths. “Adjusted to the length of their tongues, faceted eyes and shape of preference, these flowers aim to take over all unused empty spots and therefore bringing back the buzzing and fluttering sounds of those small creatures we can’t ever miss in our cityscape,” says Boelhouwer.
Also designing habitats for insects is Australian artist Kath Fries whose recent work for Cementa 2022 is Refuge, a long woven structure made of bamboo and braided jute that was installed in a tree in the Central Tablelands of NSW. Situated adjacent to a park with flowering native plants, the installation is intended for both insects and humans to engage with. “I’m hoping that solitary native bees will choose to nest in my installation come spring and summer,” Fries writes.
The structure is not intended for climbing, though it does recall childhoods spent in trees, away from adults. “A refuge is a place of safety and shelter… I’m fascinated by insects and their importance in sustaining bio-diverse ecologies, but world-wide the insect biomass is rapidly declining. Habitat regeneration is one counter measure, in this sense, Refuge is a ‘bee hotel’. It is also a refuge for our reflection on our complex biodiverse relationships, mindfully being present with the vibrant sentience of our surroundings.”
In the US, architect Ariane Lourie Harrison, Visiting Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute is working on creating habitats for bees on a larger scale. In 2019 she designed the Pollinators Pavilion, a dome-like oval structure made of concrete and covered with spiky protrusions that was built on a farm in New York’s Hudson Valley. The structure is intended for the many species of bees that are solitary, with space for 4000 bees over 300 concrete panels, each filled with bamboo shoots that mimic the structures found in the wild.
This structure is part of Harrison’s work expanding the field of architecture: “Post-human doesn’t mean we’re getting rid of humans . . . it just means we’re moving humans away from the centre of our inquiry as architects,” she told writer Steve Neumann for the Pratt website in 2019. “We’d like to use this project as a model for rebuilding those populations that are essential to biodiversity and, ultimately, our survival.”
Design is about creating material solutions for our problems – and the decline of pollinators including bees is one of the vital problems we need to solve to ensure our food chain does not get disrupted. These projects show that designers can have an impact on these wider issues that are vital for our survival.