With this idea, media design students at DHBW Ravensburg won the Red Dot Concept Award “best of the best”. Jana Lenhard, Victoria Sandvoß, Christopher Vogt and Nico Witwicki caught the jury’s eye among no less than 4724 entries from 54 countries.
Everyone is talking about bee mortality; in Germany alone, the number of bee strains has already more than halved. This has put the media designers at DHBW Ravensburg on the map – they want to get people in the cities excited about bees. Beesley is their product concept – it’s about an upcycled beehive for the city, which they have devised, tested and naturally designed.
The idea is to convert old metal filing cabinets into beehives. The students consulted intensively with beekeepers, engineers and locksmiths. They teamed up with an Australian start-up that specialises in special honey frames. The highlight: the honey comes directly from the tap at the end. This is supposed to offer an incentive to take in a bee colony. In addition, of course, there is a look that turns the filing cabinet beehive into a design object. There is evidence that bees particularly like it in the city, because less insecticides and greater biodiversity are convincing arguments for the black and yellow.
If you want to promote a business idea, you also have to convince future customers. To this end, the students at DHBW Ravensburg made a film, designed a website and submitted a business concept. In any case, the jury of the Red Dot Concept Award has already taken a bite; the award ceremony is in October in Singapore.
Apart from that, there are already some interested parties who are enthusiastic about urban beekeeping. The students are still in the test phase in 2017. What’s next? In addition to the upcoming bachelor’s degree at DHBW Ravensburg, the development will be expanded via patent and crowdfunding. In addition, the four media designers have already won second place at the RSA Student Design Award in London. There, the Royal Bank of Scotland offered the media designers to come to the island for a year and build up a business together. So the urban beehives could definitely work out.
