Bumble is an interactive program that gamifies the process of planting and pollination. With the use of keyboard and mouse cursor, the user will be able to select from a small palette of five herbaceous flowering plants and plant their “garden”- the canvas. The five plants are Eutrochium purpureum, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae, Rudbeckia hirta, Cosmos bipinnatus, and Phlox paniculata, which were chosen for their attractiveness to pollinators. Afterwards, the user can turn into a bee themselves by releasing the keys and simply left-click on the flowers to pollinate them. And they will create a beautiful image with flowers of various sizes and shapes, which can be saved or cleared by pressing a key.

One important aspect of the project is the emphasis on bees’ ability to see ultraviolet light, their lack of photoreceptors for red light, and their broader range of color vision allow them to see the world much differently from humans. We speculated how the bee would see each flower with a range of colors and we designed a world where we imagined ourselves as a bumblebee exploring the garden.