What is a Nesting Nook?
Nesting Nooks offers a home to a feathered friend. Merging technology and crafts to allow you to build a stronger relationship with the natural world. Ding-Dong your feathered friend is home, to know there calling check the light above the door. The light sensor doorbell will give you the indication someone has made your box a home. Watch them grow, watch them feed and watch them thrive. Nesting Nooks hoping to give refuge in a habitat which is consistently changing.
Brief
How could we help people build a deeper connection to the living world, enabling them to become future ambassadors of the environment and help them to live more sustainably?
Green Space Dark Skies is an event which invited you to join up with 20,000 people, from all paths in life, to experience beautiful landscapes across the Uk at dusk, between April and September 2022. The event consists of a series of mass gatherings, which celebrate nature, our responsibility to protect it and everyone’s right to explore the countryside. The landscape which we shall be focusing upon is Maiden Castle in Dorset.
The brief presented to us allowed for three different areas of involvement and after consideration, I decided to join the
participatory research strand. The participatory strand requires us to build toolkits which later shall be used at the Green Space Dark Skies event as a workshop to answer the core question being proposed. “How could we help people build a deeper connection to the living world, enabling them to become future ambassadors of the environment and help them to live more sustainably? Taking the participatory research strand will further involve designing objects in which electronics can be embedded, as well as creating templated for members of the public at the event to work from for their creations.
We shall be questioning people’s relationship to the land, inequalities of access to the landscapes as well as considering rights and responsibilities to the environment. We shall undertake user-centred design research methods to ensure our tool kit will be accessible and viable for wider communities.
Three Different Bird Boxes
With the knowledge that different birds require different homes, we concluded that our workshop will offer three different styles of boxes accommodating a small selection of birds for each one. Below I explain the three different bird boxes we will provide and for what birds they accommodate.
The tit and sparrow box has a 29mm entrance hole, these dimensions keep out their prey and offer a secure nesting ground. This box size is predominantly for the different variations of tits but sparrows would also see this as a fit home for nesting.
The woodpecker and starling bird box option has a 45mm entrance whole. These dimensions are predominantly for woodpeckers however cater for starlings too.
The final box option is a rectangular fronted box (100mm) and offers refuge to robins, wrens & swifts. Predominantly the box is targeted at robins but wrens and swifts could also make this a home for their species too.
Bird Box Design
Designing the bird box and printed assets were the jobs I undertook. This led me to take on a strong product designer role within the team. This job required me to iterate and finalise a fully functioning bird box. The outcome which I produced was something I was extremely proud of and after running the workshops at Green Space Dark Skies the RSPB, New Forest Workers and Dorset Bird Watch society expressed what a strong concept and finished product I had produced. This golden stamp from these companies and organisations reaffirmed that what I had produced was strong and had the safety of birds at the heart of its design.
Nesting Nook Book
Synthesising all the information from the RSPB website into a book was an element of the project which I took on. As the team member who works mostly in print, I constructed an informative manual which explains what a nesting nook is, how birds’ nest, what you can do for the birds, a nesting log and information about the birds which we are designing for.
The book concisely communicates all that the participants require to know to use and understand the nesting nook. Throughout the book, I utilised minimalist symbols to produce different spreads and paces throughout. This variation of pace allowed me to maintain the engagement of the reader and communicate effectively.
The books were designed in an A5 format as we believed for this to be an ideal transportable size. With the book also holding the nesting log we understand the requirement for it to be lightweight and small. Initially, I had also designed for the book to be perfect bonded but upon reflection, I understood that when making 20-30 books this process would be long. Furthermore, if the participant wished to write in the log book section at the back of the book if perfectly bonded it would be difficult to write within. With this knowledge, I concluded up binding with staples. Not only is it time effective it makes manufacturing a large number of books a manageable task. The book will also sit relatively flat enabling the nesting nook log book at the back to become much more accessible.
Final ToolKit
With the final push from the team, we were able to finish the toolkit to a high standard which as a collective we were extremely proud of. Through the designing process of this project, I have developed my problem-solving skills drastically, who knew a bird box took so much thinking! With the iterative approach and testing undertaken throughout the process, I was able to bring to the project a working bird box which can be specifically assigned to a species of bird. On the following pages is an overview of the toolkit we produced. Using the network available to me, I asked my commercial photographer housemate Zach Jacques to get some high-quality photos for us to use. These photos are also depicted on the following pages.
Green Space Dark Skies Event
When the day came to run the event, we were so excited to share the project which we had collaboratively evolved. Arriving early allowed us to get a feel for the place and explore the natural landscape ourselves. As the day moved on and people started turning up it was time to start running the workshops. Initially, we felt quite apprehensive but the four of us all drew upon our hospitality training and got involved with those passing to get them to come and try our workshop.
Running the workshop as a team was extremely rewarding and when completed as a team felt very proud of what we have achieved. It was the comments left by those who undertook the workshop that in many ways made us emotional knowing we had had an impact on their outlook on birds and crafting in general. What was so nice about the majority of these feedback slips were the comments upon us as team members we were able to help one another and have fun while doing it too. As a group, it has been a really enjoyable experience and I think we can all say we are extremely proud of what we have produced.
