Bee’otopia: Made by Bees

This chapter explores the use of critical design and storytelling as tools to moti-vate a person to choose a more sustainable path and change one’s mindset to consumption and nature. The chapter draws on the epistemological notion of lived experience, arguing that people act as a result of their direct experience and that experience is always lived. Furthermore, it is the guiding principle for this chapter that knowledge without emotion lacks intensity and emotion without knowledge lacks direction. As long as we consume products as we currently do, this perspective is relevant because it addresses the transformative force in sto-rytelling and product design. The chapter highlights how industrialized produc-tion ideals, such as standardization and precision, alienate the consumer from the production and the product and thereby from the product’s inherent footprint. The chapter starts as a philosophical discussion, connecting concepts of storytelling, self-narrative, and industrial design to address the contemporary challenges posted by the current climate crises. The second part of the chapter zooms in and presents a radical design case, Bee’otopia, that explores how designs can help us funda-mentally rethink our relationship to design, nature, and ourselves. The case: Ask if a production collaborating with bees can help us rethink our relationship to design, nature, and ourselves. In this case, lamp shades are manufactured in collabora-tion with bees leaving no waste but honey and pollinated flowers. This fundamen-tally reframes our relationship to nature and products — by consuming products you can positively impact our world and thereby enforcing a sustainable world of consumption. The final part of the chapter zooms out again and invites the reader to discuss worldmaking and storytelling as essential tools to boost intensities in climatic storytelling that will consequentially help change our present unsustain-able alienated approach to nature and product consumption and product lifetime.