Our group was tasked with figuring out how we can aid bees in Wisconsin. Bees are instrumental in many of the ecological and economic systems our society relies upon. The extinction of bees would be devastating for humanity, since bees are responsible for pollinating many of the crops and flowers we are reliant on.
However, figuring out how to save the bees is difficult, since a there are many issues they face. In this research, we discovered some of problems impacting bees.
I conducted interviews at the Wisconsin Honey Producer's conference. There, I got to interview a mixture of researchers, commercial bee keepers and beekeeping hobbyists.
Following our individual user research, our group came together to synthesize the data and discover key findings.
We organized potential stakeholders into a empathy maps. Each person placed ideas for different aspects of the stakeholder: what they say, do, think, and feel. We used empathy mapping here to help organize our research in a manner that focused on the people impacting bees.
Each team member plotted different stakeholder problems that we saw in our research. We then categorized them and connected each of those categories based on how they impact each other. The categories we came up with were: Lack of Education, Ecological Issues, Economic Issues, Commercialization Problems, and Pathogens.
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We sought to consolidate the main issues that each stakeholder faced into a single problem statement. This would help us identify the key problems to try and resolve.
Based off of the feedback provided to us and our supplementary research, we refined our problem statements. We decided to add native bees and honey bees as stakeholders. We then decided to narrow down our stakeholders from 5 to 3. I personally found the hobbyist to be one of the most compelling stakeholders, and advocated for keeping this stakeholder
We identified opportunity areas for potential future projects regarding bees. To do this, each person individually came up with an idea, and then we plotted those ideas on a scale of viability and originality.
For more details on the project, see the deliverables below.Pitch DeckWe presented this pitch deck to a panel of mentors and peers. Executive SummaryA pamphlet highlighting the key details and process of my group's research.
In previous projects, I was usually given steps to go through or guidelines for the final product. In this project, we were told the topic we were researching, that we would have to present our findings, but not the specifics of what or how to conduct our research.
This project also has a large potential scope for future projects. There is no clear solution for aiding the declining population of bees, but this research can help devise potential solutions.
