Bee Home is a free and open-sourced design, pioneering a new era of democratic design for IKEA. The project takes advantage of the newest developments in digital fabrication and parametric design, and introduces entirely new distribution methods to enable a fully democratic design process. With a design that is flexible and accessible through open-source design principles, everyone, everywhere is empowered to design and fabricate their own Bee Home locally.

The project is powered by fablabs.io, a global map of all the fab labs globally, it is core to the Distributed Design Platform ecosystem and provides designers and makers access to a global digital infrustructure. Digital designers Bakken & Bæck used the fablabs.io open API for the Bee Home digital platform, meaning that once you design your Bee Home, you can find your local fab lab and their contact to help you to digitally fabricate your Bee Home.

“To reconnect with the many bees in our environment, we need to give back what we have taken from them: their homes. By designing new interactive experiences, we can create a more sustainable manufacturing process for doing so: one that is truly open-sourced, informed by local living and customisable for many contexts and uses.”
— Myles Palmer, Project Lead, Bakken & Bæck

Step 1 Design.
Visit https://www.beehome.design/ and design your own Bee Home based on predefined parameters. This means you not only select the size, height and visual expression, but also define if you want to place your Bee Home on a rooftop, a backyard or on a balcony. This makes the design process fun, intuitive and easy enough that it can be done in a matter of minutes.

Step 2 Fabricate.
When satisfied with your design, you download the design files instantly and for free, which you can take to your local fab lab and get help to make it locally. On https://www.beehome.design/ you can find a list of fab labs in your local area.

Step 3 Place.
The final step is to place your Bee Home and plant some flowers.

SPACE10 is a research and design lab on a mission to enable a better everyday life for people and planet. SPACE10 researches and designs innovative solutions to some of the major shifts expected to affect people and our planet in the years to come. SPACE10 is proudly supported by and entirely dedicated to IKEA.

Bakken and Bæck is a technology-driven design studio that helps ambitious companies identify, explore and respond to new opportunities by building digital solutions that stand the test of time. Bakken and Bæck was recently named as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies in 2020 by Fast Company, and recognised for making complex industries accessible to everyday users. Working as one tight-knit team across their offices in Oslo, Amsterdam, Bonn and London, their work aims to have impact on a global scale.

Tanita Klein is an Interior- and Product Designer from Germany. After studying in Paris and Eindhoven, Tanita Klein joined SPACE10 for a residency, where she collaborated on the physical design of Bee Home. Tanita now lives and works in Copenhagen. Tanita likes to rethink existing contexts and create new solutions in her work inspired by current social- and environmental shifts happening in the world. Her favourite design tool is systematic thinking and modularity on a playful level.

“I want people to design a dream home for bees that provides the perfect environment for their offspring, while at the same time being incredibly easy to design, assemble and place. It was important for me that Bee Home is aesthetically pleasing and almost feels like you’ve added a sculpture to your garden or your balcony. This project really exemplifies how design can do good for both people and their environment.”
— Tanita Klein, Designer

More on fablabs.io
In 2019, Distributed Design Platform announced a collaboration with Wikifactory; projects.fablabs.io allows Fab Labs, makers and designers to keep a global inventory of projects. Read more here.