Because of different reasons such as climate change and overpopulation, the world had to change their way of consumption. Eighty percent of greenhouse gas emissions in today's society emerge from within the agricultural sector and the United Nations estimated that the level of population will increase from 6.8 billion to 9.6 billion in 2050. In our speculative future, these aspects led to finding a more sustainable food resource in order to preserve our planet.
In this future insects are the main food source, a replacement for meat from especially cows. The insects are bred on big farms as well as at almost every citizen’s home. The space that was reserved for livestock farming is now used mostly for growing fruits and vegetables, as well as insect breeding farms.
There are almost 2000 edible insects on earth and already today over 2 billion people have insects in their daily diet. This leads us to think our speculative future can be a future where we learn to harvest insects and breed them at a larger scale.
The insect breeding machine is in our speculative future an everyday kitchen appliance such as today’s fridge or dishwasher. The design is made of steel and glass, in that sense reminding of an aquarium.
The intention of our design is to breed insects at home. Users will be able to produce their own insects - which they can use as food. Having the insects breeding machine at home does have a lot of positive aspects, such as the fact that it is near produced. This reduces the transportation of animals and therefore reduces the use of fossil fuel which is better for the environment. Constantly breeding insects also becomes a lot cheaper for the user in the long term since they do not have to constantly buy new insect meat.
Eating insects is not something that is part of our (Swedes) normal diet. Bringing in insects into our diet would be a big cultural shift. The question is how we would handle that? There are a lot of aspects that would play a role in this shift. We can for example see a problem with the “ew-factor” of eating insects and what steps we would have to take to get over that factor. The first step would most likely be to eat the insects in different forms such as paste or powder.
Critical design uses design as a way to change perspective. Our design changes the view and purpose of the kitchen. It becomes more than a place where you only cook your food, but also a place where you produce the food from the beginning. Making it a kitchen appliance was a conscious choice to underline that the product would be an everyday thing in our speculative future.
Many questions about the ecosystem and environment of our speculative future emerge. For example, what happens if the insects manage to escape one of the breeding farms and fastly multiply all around the country? Will that have a negative effect on the ecosystem? There are also always risks with activists, who might try to let the insects go and release them into nature. Killing insects can be seen as unethical and could lead to activism and protests. The insect not bred in farms also run the risk of getting hunted by people who might not have the money to buy the machine and are forced to search for their food in the wild. Would that lead to some insects arts to be endangered?
