Description

Negotiating with the Garden is an ongoing project pursued in Yuta Ikeya’s garden. The project entails making a pollinator-friendly garden and surrendering to nature, through which he acknowledges the temporality of the garden and becomes familiar with the local ecosystem. Yuta Ikeya explores opportunities for technological intervention while asking: what would be the technology that becomes a part of the ecosystem while free from our desire to scrutinise nature through quantified data?

The research process encompassed a few small activities that considered how different technologies could inform him of different temporal qualities of the garden.

Yuta Ikeya currently focuses on designing a speculative activity of “making pottery with bees”, featuring red mason bees (Osmia bicornis) who use mud to build their cavity nest. In this activity, a human and bees share the same mud, where the human makes pottery with it, while the bees need it for their nest. A pottery wheel designed for this activity serves as a mud-foraging station for the bees by stopping its rotation while bees are around. By disrupting humans’ work on pottery, this tool challenges to decentralise humans and gives agency to the mason bees. The project investigates the possibility of building a new relationship among more-than-human entities through design, by especially focusing on material transactions among them.

*The project was initially started as a master thesis project at Industrial Design master’s program at Eindhoven University of Technology (Supervisor: Miguel Bruns)

Press

Design United e-magazine

Exhibition

Dutch Design Week 2023 (Design United Expo)

Publication

Yuta Ikeya, Miguel Bruns, and Bahareh Barati. 2024. Designing for Interdependence of Bees, Garden, Designer, and the Changing Season. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24), 2024. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1385–1399. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660743