Impact and Challenges of Design and Sustainability in the Industry 4.0 Era: Co-Designing the Next Generation of Urban Beekeeping

In the era of Industry 4.0, designers are expected to use new tools and approaches to innovate the design of products and services. From this perspective, the integration of design practices and technologies of the 4.0 transition can have positive implications for sustainability. Several current issues can be addressed and among them, honeybee death is relevant. Honeybees are fundamental to the ecosystem and human life. Nevertheless, their lives are extremely at risk due to exposure to several disease factors. After conducting expert interviews, the paper presents a conceptual model of intelligent beekeeping to monitor the health status of honeybees. Furthermore, after user research, the paper proposes a co-design model for urban beekeeping, scaled up to a condominium dimension, to allow condominiums and expert beekeepers to be part of an integrated design model. The critical proposition of this model is to raise awareness of the problem of honeybee death to achieve 3 out of 17 United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals: Good Health and Well-Being, Sustainable Cities and Community, and Life on Land. Early results report positive values of acceptance of the urban beekeeping practice by users and the use of IoT in managing beehives and their health status by expert beekeepers.