About wild bees and scrap bikes: final presentation in the Design Thinking seminar

(RE)flowbee - What happens to the waste?

The wild bee nesting aids or WiBiNis, as they are also very cutely abbreviated, are already making a great contribution to species conservation. However, flowbee founder Florian Wester has long been concerned about the waste generated during the production of these nesting aids. And so he commissioned one of the teams from the Design Thinking seminar to find a solution to reduce waste products and strive for a sustainable circular economy.

After the team in the flowbee workshop took a close look at which materials would be left over in the end and how much of them would be produced, there was a big brainstorming session from which a few prototypes were developed. Testing these is one of the most important tasks, as the team also demonstrated visually.

And so each prototype was presented individually. For example, the team can imagine asking customers whether they could use wood shavings or slate scraps before sending them the nesting aid. These would then simply be supplied at no cost. There is also the idea of creating comics to educate people about sustainability. Reusing the wood shavings as insulation would certainly not be a bad idea. However, there will never be enough wood shavings as waste to insulate an entire house. One practical use for the waste would be as filling material for a stress ball. The team has made one and throws it around the audience in the seminar room. To distinguish the wood dust from other dirt, one team member has built a dust separator to separate the coarse chips from the fine dust. Another practical solution is the sack. The waste is to be collected in this and in the end the bag serves as a shipping cushion in the package.

Although the group was unable to agree on the ultimate prototype, she emphasized at the end of her presentation: "Although the prototypes were all developed independently of each other, they should not necessarily be considered separately. They work best as a symbiosis."

WiBiNi Pro - The bees should have it even better

The third group has developed a slightly extended version of the small beehives from flowbee. Because they have attached a wind sensor as well as a humidity and temperature sensor, the nesting aid looks more like a weather station. The team probably thought so too, at least one of the applications developed is a weather app. However, all the measuring devices actually serve a scientific purpose. The environmental conditions are to be recorded in order to determine the perfect location for the bees.

The team had set itself the goal of creating a kind of do-it-yourself construction kit from the entire structure. They created operating instructions in simple language so that users could assemble everything themselves. However, various tests have shown that the assembly is probably not so simple and easy to understand after all. "Perhaps too complicated for the average consumer after all," says one of the group members. Incidentally, the measuring devices are powered by solar panels and a battery. Jana Hevendehl from the Bonn Economic Development Agency praised the students: "Thanks to the creative and solution-oriented design thinking process, many approaches have emerged that now serve as development opportunities for the start-up flowbee. A great collaboration between business, science and administration."