Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (1887)
One of the wonders of bees is their capacity for alchemical transformation.
Bees convert pollen and nectar into wax, honey, propolis (a protective resin), and bee bread, which if you think about it, in turn makes more bees. Bees are like biodesigners in that they transform natural substances collected from their environment to craft a multitude of functional materials and habitats. Their surrounding landscape is imprinted into everything they make.
Since Neolithic times, honey has satisfied the human taste for sweetness. Since the ancient Egyptians, beeswax has provided fuel for light. And bees have pollinated humanity’s food supply even before the advent of agriculture. Undoubtedly, bees, as small as they may seem, have been essential to the flourishing of human life.
Karl von Frisch, who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the dance language of bees, proclaimed that the bee’s life is a “magic well,” the deeper you delve the more you find to explore [1]. We follow in Frisch’s footsteps.
For the last five years, we have been framing design practices with our students around the lifeworld of bees. Our creative practices and pedagogical approaches navigate the relationship between humans, bees, and the environment with the hope that it may be an instructive blueprint for future biodesigners and for the interdependent relationships we develop with other species.
The two of us came together as a biomedical engineer and arts educator in an unexpected way—working at the same summer scholars program with the under-resourced high school across the street from our university. Nandita who had already been enthralled with bee research, guided her students in an art and design approach to learning about colony collapse disorder. Her students read fiction, watched films, visited local bee hives, sketched bee anatomy, learned 3D printing, and ultimately prototyped solutions for colony collapse. Whitney, a bioengineering professor, noticed how the subject captivated students. By the end of the summer, she turned to Nandita and said, “We are going to design a course together.”
Over five years of teaching our curriculum to high schoolers and then university students our collaboration has evolved. At first, we were simply a designer and engineer working through similarities and differences in the ways we interpreted making. Designers and engineers both iterate, prototype, and engage in critique and feedback, but often with very different approaches and vocabularies. Rather than choosing one or the other, ultimately our teaching goals and methods intertwined.
Beginning with a feeling of wonder for this tiny insect, and then empathy for it, we and eventually our students developed a new awareness for the many threads that bind us to each other and the natural world. This circularity is experienced by students when they realize that the plants they grow in front of their own homes affect bee health, or, at a different scale, when they learn the impacts of monoculture agriculture.
In retrospect, we had been primed for this collaboration. Whitney’s parents embody the marriage of art and science: her mother is a middle school art teacher and her late father was a high school physics instructor. Her mother upcycled materials to create murals and sculptures on walls and in the doorways of older buildings in downtown Mansfield, Ohio. Her father taught her mathematical and analytical concepts as they worked together to build her grandparents’ barn. Whitney’s passion to understand how living creatures and nonliving systems function prompted her to pursue engineering, but she found herself in a field that often prioritizes optimization over innovation. She found gratification only later in teaching biodesign.
Meanwhile, as a first-generation immigrant, Nandita was acutely aware of cultural boundaries and margins. Navigating her Indian heritage with daily life in the Midwest and living for years as an American expatriate in Asia, she came to appreciate the ways that cultures overlap, clash, and at the same time have the potential to enhance one another. The same can be said of the process of navigating between the worlds of the arts and sciences. Having a curiosity-driven research mindset has helped her both navigate through Beijing in Mandarin and teach science students as an artist.
Broadly, we represent a bridge between science and art, joining artistic empathy with scientific objectiveness. Concepts develop that might have been lost within the confines of a singular discipline. Ultimately, we hope that our teaching will serve as a blueprint for collaborations focused on specific research topics and will spark active engagement across disciplines.
We are often asked, “Why bees?” to which we answer that bees are amazing in their own right and deserve study. But studying them also reveals an interconnectedness with plants, soil, atmosphere, and the multiplicity of species that sustain planetary life.
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[1] Frisch, Karl von. Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses and Language, Comstock Publishing, 1972.
Nandita Baxi Sheth has worked as an architect, planner, educator, and researcher. She teaches a transdisciplinary Honors Course at the University of Cincinnati in collaboration with Whitney Gaskins called Sticky Innovation. She is a collaborator with the Strange Tools Research Lab in the Digital Futures Program at UC. Nandita has a BA from Rice University and a MA from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. She is currently a doctoral student at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA).
Whitney Gaskins is the Assistant Dean of Inclusive Excellence and Community Engagement at the University of Cincinnati College of Engineering and Applied Science, the only African-American female currently teaching in the faculty of the College of Engineering. Whitney earned a PhD in Biomedical Engineering and Engineering Education. In 2009, she founded The Gaskins Foundation, a non-profit organization, whose mission is to educate and empower the African American community. She was named the 2017 K12 Champion by the National Association of Multicultural Engineering Program Advocates.
Cite This Essay
Baxi Sheth, Nandita and Whitney Gaskins. “What Biodesign Means to Us.” Biodesigned: Issue 5, 21 January, 2021. Accessed [month, day, year].
