La Ruche Qui Dit Oui

La Ruche qui Dit Oui is a La Ruche qui Dit Oui (from French to English: The Hive that Says Yes!) it’s a community supported agriculture project based in France founded by an industrial designer and chef. It’s an autonomic network of distribution and supplying of organic food that aims to give people the opportunity and the tool to freely create their own supplying networks in their communities.

It offers several offline and online tools to create independent “hives” or “ruches” and its role is to guide and help the actors/bees through the process of creating their local networks, to verify objectively aspects such as product requirements and labels, and to promote a new model of fair-trade agriculture.

The service aims to create “ruches” in communities in order to support local producers and provide an easy access to local and organic products to people in a fair trade model, their slogan is “Eat Better, Eat Fair” (“Manger Mieux, Manger Juste”).

I got involved in this project by researching the role a “new sustainable designer”, I did an extensive research about the process of creation of the service and about the qualities and capabilities of designer that was creating it. My aim was to analyze how can designers be part of developing solutions of social and sustainable innovation, looking at their role in a more meaningful and diverse way and to discover through this the most valuable aspects and capabilities that designers involved in this are may have.

If you are interested in the findings and the whole research you can write me asking me for my thesis.

And read a part about it written by John Thackara here