The Bee Experience

For our final project, we created an interactive “bee experience”. This is a concept for a travelling museum exhibit that would highlight colony collapse disorder (CCD) and bring the plight of the bees to the public’s attention. This “bee experience” would have two parts. The first part would be the advertising green walls, and the second part would be the actual museum exhibit, which would be displayed at local arts and sciences museums.

As a method of drawing attention to the exhibit, green walls would be displayed throughout the city. These green walls would be vertical installations with native flowering plants covering itself. There would then be a “bee trail” that would guide people through finding out what the exhibit is all about. The plants in these green walls would be permanent installations sponsored by local groups and schools. The flowers on the installations would attract bees and serve as a habitat for bees and other pollinators. In addition, there are flyers that would be posted throughout the city that state (with a whole lot of doom and gloom), “Where are they?” These posters would also serve to lead people to the exhibit. Finally, there would be a large social media presence through platforms including Instagram. Together, the three of these would serve to bring as many people in to view the exhibit as possible.

Once a visitor arrived to the exhibit, they would be greeted by a yellow beeline that would lead them through a winding pathway that would explain about CCD. Chief among this would be four hexagonal rooms. These rooms would explain one of the primary causes of CCD: the varroa mite, cross-country transportation, pesticides, and monocultures. Each of these rooms would be unique, with some being sensory experiences and others being more traditional museum exhibits. In between each of these rooms would be a hallway with interactive mini-exhibits along the way. At the end of the exhibit, there would be an area where you could donate to the cause and/or pick up an informational brochure with a packet of seeds of native flowering plants.

The most interesting part of the project for me was coming up with a presentation for it. I’m used to just presenting a powerpoint for most classes, but this project lent itself well for an alternative style of presentation. We were able to transform our classroom into a model of our exhibit by taping off the path that would be followed by the viewers. This allowed us to interactively explain our exhibit, even showing a model of our exhibit (an exhibit for ants) and a model of our green wall concept along the way.