DeBugged by Design

All life requires three simple things to thrive, they are:

  • Food
  • Shelter
  • A mate

While we can do little about the first we can address the last two through our DeBugged by Design project. While we cant stop bed bugs from being introduced to a location.

The last 13+ years has taught us a lot about how they behave and thus how they can be controlled when they do get in.

Shelter

In the same way that birds use the bird boxes in your garden despite the numerous other nesting options bed bugs have a preferred style of home, a set of principles we exploited in the design of the Passive Monitor, after all, a home you want something to use must be appealing to start off with. The trick I to make the rest of location less appealing so they are encouraged to only be where we want them to be and in doing so tricked to defecate on the detection plate. This approach has resulted in us designing fixtures and furniture for commercial and domestic settings which corral unwanted guests into places they are easier to deal with. Our simple “six sigma” bed is the epitome of minimalist design an I undergoing field testing in commercial setting.

A Mate

When caught early bed bugs don’t have the opportunity to be joined by potential mates and thus the next generation never arrives. However, if a matched pair of adult or a gravid female does arrive studies have shown that eggs are commonly laid inside the Passive Monitor which if checked weekly will be showing sign before the eggs have had time to mature and hatch.

Project Data

The project deliverable is a subscription to all the PowerPoint and PDF files we have on the subject which are reviewed and added to as we add clients, the current package includes:

  • Details of a simple bed design that reduced the impact of bed bugs
  • Executive summaries of the principles of designing out bed bugs from locations
  • A summary of suitable and non-suitable materials

We envisage that this project will be of significant interest to designers, architects and those in the business of manufacturing and supplying furniture. To ensure accessibility to the data the cost is set by the size of the client and how many parties we need to brief