Bee & Bee PDX receives Fast Company World Changing Ideas Recognition
The winners of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards were announced today, honoring the businesses, policies, projects, and concepts that are actively engaged and deeply committed to pursuing innovation when it comes to solving health and climate crises, social injustice, or economic inequality.
We are very excited to announce that Bee & Bee PDX was selected as a finalist! Bee & Bee PDX was created in partnership with PNCA (Pacific Northwest College of Art) Graduate Collaborative Design and Design Systems Students and faculty member Skye Moret. In the Spring 2020 Semester Blendily approached the school to design a beehive to be installed in the Blendily Garden. After diving into extensive research on bees and current hive products, the students created an innovative and modular ‘bee-first’ hive design that emphasizes honeybee and native bee health along with the needs for commercial honey, wax, and propolis.
The PNCA ‘Bee Lab’ students installed their prototype in the Blendily Garden in early July 2020. The new design features: ‘Bee-First’ modules that restrict human disturbances, ‘Harvest’ modules designed to open horizontally for easy inspection and honey frame removal, ‘Native Bee Habitats’ to support the many other bee species experiencing population decline, and open modules to be used as planters or tool storage.
“The Blendily X PNCA Bee Lab created a real-world opportunity for design students to examine existing beekeeping systems and find opportunities for improvement, said Ivy Chuang, Blendily Founder. “This project aims to support local bee populations by providing an accessible solution to urban beekeeping. Human innovation is built upon incremental improvement. Oftentimes, innovation doesn’t come in the form of a game-changing invention like the discovery of electricity but in smaller ways that build upon an initial idea with a well-defined goal like ours.”
“There is no question our society and planet are facing deeply troubling times. So, it’s important to recognize organizations that are using their ingenuity, impact, design, scalability, and passion to solve these problems,” says Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “Our journalists, under the leadership of senior editor Morgan Clendaniel, have discovered some of the most groundbreaking projects that have launched since the start of 2020.”
Now in its fifth year, the World Changing Ideas Awards showcase 33 winners, more than 400 finalists, and more than 800 honorable mentions—with Health and Wellness, AI & Data among the most popular categories. A panel of eminent Fast Company editors and reporters selected winners and finalists from a pool of more than 4,000 entries across transportation, education, food, politics, technology, and more. Plus, several new categories were added, including Pandemic Response, Urban Design, and Architecture. The 2021 awards feature entries from across the globe, from Brazil to Denmark to Vietnam.
Showcasing some of the world’s most inventive entrepreneurs and companies tackling exigent global challenges, Fast Company’s Summer 2021 issue (on newsstands May 10) highlights, among others, a lifesaving bassinet; the world’s largest carbon sink, thanks to carbon-eating concrete; 3D-printed schools; an at-home COVID-19 testing kit; a mobile voting app; and the world’s cleanest milk.
We continue to test the prototypes. If you are interested in supporting Bee & Bee PDX you can donate to our Patreon: