In the apiary
This week Master Beekeeper Erin McGregor-Forbes invited me to her home to confer on the plans and details of the mobile observation hive. The original intent had been to build the structure on the back of a small tow-a-long trailer, however, after our conversation it seems the better approach will be to construct the hive inside a larger, covered trailer. This trailer can be outfitted as not only a place to view the bees, but also a place to sit, relax and read about them…more like a little room. A bee room.
Honeybees, much like many social insects (ants and termites for instance) operate as a super-organism. A super-organism is a group of individual organisms who not only could not survive without the colony but also have a complex social hierarchy with highly specialized divisions of labor working in concert for the health of the whole. This basic recognition is an extremely important concept in understanding the workings of the colony and fits nicely in parallel with their necessity to pollinating the flora of their surrounding landscape.
Erin also has a few queen-rearing colonies; colonies that produce queens that can be used to re-queen queen-less colonies. Finding the queen can be a chore being that there can be 20,000 to 100,000 bees in a mature colony depending on the season.
To make things easier, beekeepers will mark the queen with a small dot of paint. To do this, once the queen is found, she is placed in a small plastic container with a small wooden plunger. The plunger has a soft end and is used to push the queen gently against the screened end. Here the queen is stuck and can be easily painted with a paint pen.
Lemann Foundation Conference …and feedback
Today, the Porvir office had a different kind of morning. Every August, Fundação Lemann, a Brazilian organization that addresses issues in education, and is a close collaborator of Porvir, hosts a seminary on education and innovation, called the 3rd International Seminar on Entrepreneurship and Education in Brazilian Education. In addition to founding the Lemann Center at Stanford University, the Lemann foundation provides valuable learning tools such as translation of online courses, and scholarships to a Brazilian audience.
While I was very excited to hear from today’s guest speakers, whose papers I had been reading for the first half of the summer, I was also a bit apprehensive about the panels. In my own quest to define the term “innovation” (more on that later), I am coming to the conclusion that there is no definition, and that this research is almost in vain. At the start of my project this summer, I thought that in doing research about innovation in education, I had to first define the term itself. Over the past few weeks, I have realized that innovation is not a single action, event or piece of technology, but a combination of factors that make sense when applied together in a new way. With this in mind, my focus in the innova+ project has shifted toward a better understanding of what we are looking for in our publication, and thus, describing the project to our partners has become much more natural.
So, back to this morning’s event. We all met up at Espaço Manacá, on the busy Avenida 9 de julho, for a half-day conference on education reforms, the role of innovation in education, and a presentation of the results of recent policy changes in education. Among the speakers at the event were Paulo Blikstein, creator of FabLab@School, David Plank, a policy analyst and professor at Stanford, Martin Carnoy, researcher on the relationship between development and education, and Eric Bettinger, associate professor in the Stanford University School of Education and researcher in “the economics of education.” The panels were a way for each professor to share his work with a Brazilian audience, and to engage the audience in debates on the various approaches to policy changes, despite the time crunch and limited time for Q+A at the end.
What struck me most from all the panels was Professor Bettinger’s, presentation on the statistics of Brazilians studying abroad. He showed that a significant majority of Brazilian students who study abroad return to Brazil after their studies. In his discourse on the question of education across borders, he asked whether sending Brazilian students to study in other countries was a brain drain or a brain gain, to which the answer will only be determined in the next few decades, if ever. Throughout his presentation, I began to think of my own experience with studying internationally. While my entire academic life has been in the United States, I feel very much that I have been educated by my two countries: Brazil and the US. I continued to think of the challenges as well as advantages of an international education, and the new culture of “global citizens” that is beginning to form.
Throughout his discourse, I also thought of the work I am doing here at Porvir, and how, methodical our approach has been up to this point. We outlined our goals: to make contacts, get input, sort out the entries and publish the document. From my first day here, I was growing increasingly frustrated with the factors that were limiting our very clear outline and pushing our deadlines back each and every day. When working with partners, our dates and meeting times depend on a larger variety of factors. I had an “AHA!” moment when I realized that the solution to this was approaching the process in a different way. Understanding the obstacles of working across continents and timezones, we had to accept that our process would not be linear, but more like a series of waves, in which we have a ton of deliverables from one day to the next, and then await feedback from the other side of the Atlantic. The process is much more malleable and should have room for new input all the time. Just this notion has been a huge learning experience for working internationally, and with some of the bureaucracies of the non-profit world.
I left the conference feeling ready to take on the next stages of innova+ project, and having made many contacts to connect with for input in the next few weeks!
The move north
This week the colony that will occupy the observation hive was finally moved north. The hive had been building strength and population in North Hampton, NH for the first two months of the summer and Monday night made the move to the shore of Sebago lake in Raymond, ME.
It is best to move bees after nightfall as all foraging bees have gathered back at the hive for the night. Though they are still active, they are more tranquil than during daylight hours.
A trick I discovered during the move was to use an uncapped LED lantern. The light attracts the bees that manage to escape while strapping the hive together and blocking the entrance with a strip of wood. An LED bulb is cool enough for them to land on and the clear plastic lens contains them nicely. These half dozen bees that had escaped stayed perched in the lantern for the duration of the two hour drive to the lake and were happily returned to the colony when we arrived.
Seeming to be healthy and strong, this week was about making sure the bees were settling in comfortably. Though this is the weakest of the three colonies, it seemed the best to move as it is the smallest as the colony still filling in the bottom hive body. In fact, the colony is much busier in their new location than they were in New Hampshire even after re-queening. They have been foraging, coming in with red, green and yellow pollen, as well as rearing new brood.
During the hive inspections, it was clear to see the waggle dance they perform to communicate food sources.
Post World Cup, Moving Forward…!
The World Cup, Winter Break and a few other challenges have created some detours in the innova+ project, but nothing impeding us from moving forward slow and steady. We are currently past the first phase of the initiative, in which we have made contact with our partners, developed graphics and visual tools to communicate our objectives and laid down some strategic plans for how to keep moving forward.
In early July, a Spanish telecommunications company with a large branch here in Brazil released their “Top 100” project, which was a list of the best innovations in STEM education from the past year. Sound familiar? We thought so too. Check it out on this link: top100_educational_innovations

On the same week this project was released, we had already scheduled a meeting with them about another collaboration we have going. I’ve quickly learnt that in the NGO world, partnerships are key and working together is the best (and only) way to move forward. There cannot be competition among non-profits, for the very principle of their goals: to help others. If one organization competes with another for an audience, technology or even a grant, then the effort will lose focus and goals will be pushed even further away. As with a lot of what we learn at RISD, teamwork is essential, especially for the ambitious.
So, instead of being let down by the project that seemed so similar to our initiative, we took it as an opportunity to create a new link. We also saw all of the differences between our goals and what they were proposing, and explained to them that in fact, we were not at all trying to compete with anyone but create something to supplement the existing publication. All of this meant one thing for us, though. We had to go back to the drawing board with the name of the project, which up to this point had been “100+.”
This potential challenge was actually taken as an opportunity to revisit some of our goals and actually jumpstart our initiative. Sticking to our strong belief in teamwork, I called for a brainstorming session with the journalists, administration and anyone else who was interested in racking our brains for ideas. At lunch, we shared our thoughts on the “Top 100” publication and how the information had been presented. After all, these projects are about communication and how to make information the most accessible to a large and diverse audience, which is where design plays a very important role.
Our greatest challenge with the name of the project was to create something catchy, that would be understood and recognized in many different countries. Using our best “Design Thinking” brainstorming and a mix of Portuguese, English and Latin keywords, we decided to eliminate the number “100” from the title. We felt that it was too limiting and the focus was not so much on the quantity but the quality of the content. The name we decided upon was innova+, which has Latin roots and can be interpreted in many ways. The rest of the visual language for the project was developed based on the idea that many things can come together to create a larger whole. You can find some of the graphics and communication material right here: innova+ convite para especialistas english.
Below are a few logo iterations we went over, before dedicing on the final innova+ logo in the presentation above.
The next phase of the project will be to start collecting the content from our partners and specialists and, meanwhile think of a format to communicate all this information in the best way possible!
‘Kitne Kadam’ (How many steps)
This week I hit my first major set-back, and it was a disheartening yet learning experience. Working in Zamrudpur, a village in the heart of Delhi, with its many caste and cultural nuances, is the first time I had to work in such a capacity on ground, even in a place I call home, and I’m learning that its far trickier to navigate a socio-political landscape that the physical one.
In India, especially in small neighborhoods, open markets or communities, close knit units and narrow streets, force most of the movement to be pedestrian. Here, distance measurement and way guidance gets simplified beyond actual dimensions and the human body becomes an important tool itself. Distance is most often measured in steps (‘kadam’ literally translating to feet) and directions would be given in the form of “take the first left, and about 30 steps from there is my house” or “the shops are tucked away in the alley barely 10 steps from the temple entrance”.
The greater Delhi city has existed since the mythological period of the Mahabharata and over time, its many rulers have left marks of their rein in the form of forts, walls, tombs, gateways, mosques and pavilion. Currently there exist over 300 such structures, ranging from the Sultan Ghari tomb, the oldest tomb in India built in 1231 to the Qila-i-Mubarak (Red fort) built in mid 1600’s. When we realize that this is just one city in a country the size of India, logistically, it has been near impossible for the concerned bodies, the Archaeological Society of India (ASI) and INTACH to catalogue or maintain each and every one of such structures. Their current conditions range from those incorporated to UNESCO World Heritage site and well maintained, to those semi protected by fences, to many nameless remnants scattered around. Though the jurisdiction ruling states that no constructions can take place within 200 meters of any historical monument, it is often overruled either by illegal encroachment or by certain loopholes in the city byelaws.
Zamrudpur is home to seven 14th century tombs located throughout this small community. During the past two weeks I’ve been hunting the archives of the ASI and INTACH to find more information about them. Unfortunately there’s no historical record of these tombs, the only mention being that of a Maulvi Zafar Hasan in a record of the city’s historical monuments in the first decade of the 20th century, who also attributes them to being of unknown origin.
Owning to the village’s status as a lal dora urban village, there were some byelaws that it got exempted from and many that offered grey zones of interpretation leading to encroachments. In its growth and expansion in the heart of prime real estate of the city, its buildings and structures grew such that they’ve almost completely engulfed these historical monuments. Buildings have sprung up next to, around, and through these tombs, all but hiding them from plain sight.
As an experiment in way finding, I wanted to try calling out the location of these tombs through the winding lanes of the community. The small size of the community and the nature of their presence mean that the tombs are 15-20 meters at most off any of the main streets in the neighborhood. Expressing this in a layman’s anthropometric measurement understanding, we decided to paint markers exposing the nearby tombs and the number of “steps” that they were away from that spot.
I created the stencils, with which some of the children started painting around the neighborhood. Unfortunately, we had barely started, when a few residents created a commotion regarding our project. Many families have illegally encroached upon these tombs, using them as sheds for their cows, or extensions of their homes. They got afraid that our project was trying to raise the issue in the municipal corporation’s eyes. They’ve already been in court battles with the ASI for years regarding the status of these tombs. Despite our best efforts, and to try maintaining an acceptance of the NGO and our project in the community we had to abandon it mid way.
My personal opinions on the situation and the legalities notwithstanding, (I am personally against historical monuments becoming passive, caged relics, with my own thesis project exploring the possibility of establishing a weekly market in the another monument complex in the city – Hauz Khas monument), we understood the futility of trying to press this strategy in such a short duration of my stay and instead try another avenue to explore way-finding in the community. Way-finding clues, which would be visually engaging and provoking, instead of being mere signage guiding movement.
(This post was written at the end of last week, being uploaded now thanks to my ongoing struggle with the available Internet connection. This week, we’re trying a different strategy, that seems to be getting a good response and I’ll be able to critique better it once its finished completely.)
– Zoya
The Beginning of the End
With only two weeks left, I’m nearing the end of my internship and fellowship experience at Massport.
We had a meeting earlier this week with public policy officials from the Federal Aviation Administration. They flew in from D.C. to learn more about Massport’s Resiliency Program and the steps taken within the last six months to assess potential vulnerabilities, harden critical facilities, and establish Design Flood Elevations for existing buildings and new construction.
We’re also in the early stages of branding Massport’s Resiliency Program. I drafted a few iterations of possible logos last month, after which we brought in the big guns–Massport’s Art Director and Senior Marketing Manager–to develop a final product.

Our three favorite logo ideas, as designed by Massport’s Art Director. These three icons were presented during a senior staff meeting and the overwhelming favorite was:
I’ve been working on some new projects while waiting for authorization to take the Resiliency Webpages live. Our next Speaker Series event is in about two weeks and we’ve started putting together our upcoming Fall Series. I researched existing resilient building codes and drafted an opening to a set of new Resilient Design Guidelines, which a consultant is now working on. I’ve also been researching grants applicable to a potential Resiliency Task Force. The Task Force would be a collaboration between regional transportation and water-related agencies. This partnership would look at resilience with a wider lens and could lead to comprehensive, city-wide resilient transportation strategies. This is important because hardening Massport’s facilities to withstand a disaster won’t do much good if the city’s essential services are crippled, tunnels are flooded, and public transportation is inaccessible.
Although within the context of resilience and public policy, I think that these projects reflect the work of a designer: making information accessible to a wider audience, working collaboratively, and getting people to the table to discuss solutions to shared concerns.
–Adria
Friday in the apiary
Following the scare and concern of the last couple weeks over the health of the hives, this week each of the three hives I have are bustling with activity. Early in the week I took a trip to Merrimack, NH to visit Hillside Apiaries run by Allen Lindahl. The hives are reaching a critical mass and thus is time to expand their condo by adding another hive body (box to hold frames). Allen is a charming New Hampshire man running a small beekeeping supply store from his home. He has 21 years of experience and thus a tremendous amount of knowledge. He is very friendly and encourages any beginning beekeepers to call him with questions: 603 429 0808 or Allen@hillsidebees.com.
Natural comb production on the inner cover shows the necessity to provide more living space for the bees.
Worker bees secrete wax from a gland on the front side of their abdomen. A drop of wax is released from the body and hardens when it comes into contact with air. This wax is thin and resembles a fish scale. From the abdomen, the bee moves the wax with her legs passing it forward where she masticates it, mixing in saliva and softening it for use in construction. Above is a picture of a worker making comb.
Today we saw the neighbor working in his garden and decided to bring him a little treat.
The bees had a little feast when we opened the honey stores.
While visiting with Kevin, the neighbor, we had a conversation about the use of pesticides on his Hibiscus plant that had been attacked by worms. He said that it was his instinct to use a common pesticide from Home Depot to treat the plant but worried about the bees. He still had the product he was planning to use so we decided to check it out.
Sure enough, in bold type face in the information on the back of the bottle:
Luckily Kevin hadn’t sprayed the plant yet and passed along an organic and CHEAP! method of treating the plant’s worm infestation. Here is the recipe for Hot Pepper Spray:
Soak 5 hot peppers and 5 cloves of garlic in 1/4 cup of water for 30 minutes. Blend this mix into a paste and add 1 teaspoon of dish soap, 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda and 1/4 teaspoon of vegetable oil. Blend together and combine with 1 quart of water.
Also, found this great poster of the life of the honeybee at Hillside Apiaries. It clearly shows the different classes a worker bee will go through during its life as well as nicely illustrating the developmental stages of the queen, worker and drone from egg to emersion.
Immersion in Utilities
–Allison Wong
Last week I ranted a little bit about how I still don’t know how to deal with the question “what are you doing this summer?” (even though I’m already going into Week 7 – oof). So I thought it would be worthwhile to write a bit about some things I have actually been doing.
As you may remember, I’m working with the law firm DeLuca and Weizenbaum in their efforts to launch a new public interest law center in the state – the RI Center for Justice. In its beta year, the center will be focused on housing broadly defined. This could encompass landlord-tenant issues, evictions, code enforcement, discrimination, homeless rights, etc. This year, there have been several community meetings to start conversations about what housing issues could be addressed, and one of the areas that came up as a potential focus was utility shutoffs.
As a design researcher embedded in the early stages of the law center’s formation, my big picture research questions include: 1) How do individuals currently deal with their particular housing issues? 2) What are people’s current points of housing-related interaction with the legal system? But in order to focus my activities in the short amount of time I have, I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about the experience of energy insecurity.
This has brought me to the George Wiley Center (GWC), an agency that organizes for policy change on issues including utilities. Though they reach people from across the state, their office – marked by the giant affordable energy lightbulb in the window – is in downtown Pawtucket:
Though their core mission is organizing for policy change, the GWC in April began holding twice weekly “utility clinics” with a new consumer advocate from National Grid. When people call in with an urgent situation, they can now come meet with the National Grid representative face to face to try to work something out.

The George Wiley Center’s theory of change: GWC is a statewide group actively committed to local community organizing for the purpose of creating social and economic justice through changes in public policy.
The folks at the GWC have been really accommodating in letting me observe the work that happens at the center. I’ve been sitting with Roxanne – the woman from National Grid – at the utility clinics, listening and watching during the clinic’s half hour appointments. I’ve also had some great conversations with the GWC staff and their community organizer, Camilo Vivieros, on topics ranging from utilities, the tension between direct service and policy change, and capturing people’s stories for advocacy.
I’ve been trying to challenge myself to visualize what I’m observing and learning, so over the last week I’ve been working on creating a journey map to plot the experience someone goes through when their utilities are shut off. I’m hoping this will be a valuable tool for talking both with the GWC and the law center team. In making this journey map, I’ve thought through more questions and am sure there are things I’ve missing – but it’s a good step in starting to discuss people’s access points to services and where the law might fit in.
This coming week, I will be going to interview a woman who recently contacted the GWC. After having her gas shut off for a few months, she’s now at risk for losing her Section 8 voucher. She needs legal help in her corner, but I really don’t know what will happen with her situation. It’s an incredible privilege to be invited into someone’s home…and I’m hoping that capturing and sharing her story will help the law center help others with similar situations in the future.
This is a bit of what I have actually been doing – more to come soon.
Community Sundays
This Sunday we had the first of our bi-weekly community meetings. This was a chance for us at Adhyayan to interact with about seventy senior members of the community including community leaders, the local political representative and the parents of the students at Adhyayan.
Though I had been exploring the neighborhood and talking to people on my own these past weeks, this allowed us all to collectively meet and communicate, as well as for us to show the adults some of the work the children had been working on and engage them in an experiment whose success lies in the active collaboration of the whole community and not just kids at Adhyayan. We have been lucky to secure space in the community hall Chaupal, which will serve as the venue of our meetings, screenings and exhibitions in the neighborhood.
Through the meeting, we explained some of the goals of our project – making the neighborhood more accessible and safer for any outsider, from a guest to a potential customer and business, and thereby breaking some of current stereotypes and prejudices that Zamrudpur village faces. By introducing the adults to the initiative, we hope to involve them in the upcoming weeks’ work in which we’ll take to the streets – painting, installing and scattering graphic markers throughout the neighborhoods.
Most importantly, the aim was to address the urgent and immediate issue of community ownership and neighborhood pride in the form of tackling the garbage and hygiene issues in the area. “We ourselves are the perpetrators and we ourselves have to live in the conditions that we create. Why is that we understand the importance of cleanliness and hygiene and thus take great pains to clean our homes, but don’t recognize the street outside as being the forecourt, the ‘aangan’ to the home.” Instead of us trying to preach about systematic cleanliness, we showed the children’s’ work where their capture of the everyday conditions from watching their own parents throw out trash to their choice in mapping the ways to their homes showed their astute observation and impact of the actions of their parents.
Movement through street submerged in water because of clogged drains, health concerns brought from unhygienic conditions and the loss of potential business from neighborhood communities due to unfavorable conditions harms the residents themselves. Therefore addressing the issue has direct and immediate consequences on their own lives and livelihoods.
An important consensus that came up was the need to include the shopkeepers in understanding the potential of our project in directly affecting their businesses. “Why is that kids from neighboring schools and Lady Shri Ram College don’t just walk up to their stationary and sweet shops? Why don’t residents of the next-door Greater Kailash and East of Kailash colonies frequent their grocers and corner stores? All of them harbor certain biases and instead choose to walk or drive a greater distance in another direction.”
The food and party afterwards was a good way to chat with some of the ladies who seem to have finally stopped eyeing me as a suspicious outsider and for the amazing kids to have an afternoon of fun. There’s nothing like samosas to get us Indians in a good mood!
Though we received a positive response from the community, there wasn’t an impulse for active participation from the adults yet. I hope that in the coming weeks, once people start seeing the installations come up in the streets, that there will be a greater interest and engagement.
– Zoya

















































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