Designing Wearable Fishbowls for (Non)Human Shared Mobility and Distributed Agency

6000

Have you ever wondered what “life in a fishbowl” is like? Humans often use this phrase to describe a life that is trapped, overexposed, and difficult to escape. For fish, however, the fishbowl is not just a metaphor but a designed condition that shapes their movement, perception, and welfare. This project asks how design might respond if fish were treated not as objects to be observed or decorations, and foreground them as living nonhuman participants whose movement becomes consequential to human mobility. Students will design a family of three wearable fishbowls as cultural probes (or design probes) that stage different forms of shared mobility between fish and humans. They will then use these probes in an ethnographic study to examine how people interpret and bodily respond to fish-led action. By combining more-than-human design with ethnographic research, the project helps students explore how design can move beyond human-centered thinking and open new possibilities for interspecies interaction.

This project asks how design can materialize more-than-human relations rather than merely discuss and debate them conceptually. Its central research question is:

How do human participants and observers interpret and bodily respond to fish-led movement in a wearable fishbowl design probe?

The project also asks:
1. How do different design probes, i.e., weable fishbowl, modes shape human interpretation of piscine agency?
2. How do people bodily respond through hesitation, override, stabilization, or refusal when a nonhuman agent appears to lead movement?
3. What do these responses reveal about the difficulty of moving beyond anthropocentric assumptions in design?

Together, these questions connect artifact design and development with ethnographic inquiry.

This project is expected to generate both design outcomes and research outputs.
First, the project will produce a comparative family of three wearable fishbowl designs that explore different forms of shared mobility between fish and humans. These probes will contribute to more-than-human design by treating the fish as a living participant whose movement becomes materially consequential to human experience. These outcomes may serve future exhibitions and conference demos.
Second, the project will generate ethnographic findings about how humans interpret and bodily respond to piscine agency. The study will reveal the tension between conceptual openness and embodied resistance and how humans interpret the fish-led actions. It will show how different designs influence interpretation, and how different modes produce different levels of surrender, negotiation, and the reclaiming of control. These findings may support future conference papers, journal articles, or further research on more-than-human interaction.