During the fall semester of 2021 I took part in the “Sticky Innovation” honors seminar. This experience used the issue of bees to explore art-based research and the design process as a whole. Throughout the course, we were challenged to come up with potential solutions to various problems facing bee populations globally. These solutions were speculative in nature, and ranged anywhere from designing a safe haven for pollinators in an urban environment to changing the biology of honeybees to be better suited for survival. To come up with these ideas, we would work collaboratively in small groups with various different fields of study to go through the design process. While some of the solutions we came up with are a bit more unrealistic than others, the act of going through the stages of design and innovative thinking forced us all to look at how we view problems differently.
For example, our final project involved addressing some “Wicked Problem” (a problem interconnected with other problems that is nearly impossible to completely solve) faced by honeybees through speculative design of a product. My group consisted of an interior design major, a biomedical engineering major, an environmental engineering major, and an IT major. We used our different backgrounds to approach the issue in a way that is completely unique to our group, and we came up with a solution that involved retrofitting old buildings in urban environments with hydroponic farms that both provide a safe haven for bee populations and provide food for communities prone to food deserts. In the end, this design was speculative, so we have no way of knowing whether or not this solution would be effective or practical. However, the process of coming up with this solution to a seemingly impossible challenge allowed us to think of these otherwise disheartening existential issues in a hopeful manner rather than with an apathetic "why bother trying" mindset. |
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Ultimately, I feel as though this course was a culmination of all of the other honors seminars I have taken in my time at the University of Cincinnati. This course combined collaborative design similar to what I did in my “Inquiry to Innovation: The Cincinnati Zoo Challenge” course with the complicated nature of tackling “Wicked Problems” as I learned about in my “Environmental Futures” seminar. While these courses have made me both more aware of the issues that we face as a global society and aware of the up-hill battle for solutions to these issues, they have also empowered me to look at these problems in a way that is productive.