The Abovemarine – ‘Small Freedom’ vehicle for José, the betta splendens

The Abovemarine is a fish vehicle that designed to allow fish controlling the movement of the fish tank (it`s more like the fish tank following the fish`s movement rather than in controlled by the fish). A camera was set above the fish tank, tracking Jose(the Siamese fighting fish ), Omni wheels at the bottom then move accordingly. The creator Adam Ben-Dror actually train his fish to follow his hand as he moved it around the tank. 

This is an interesting concept of allowing creating an environment for interaction which has no human directly involved. The interaction for this project is between the fish and the space surrounding. Like an ultimate revenge for a fish finally would be able to travel on land and explore what it has never been able to explore. 

This could lead us to think outside the box, does interaction design really has to have the element of human to be called "Interaction Design"? I mean in "what is interaction design" presentation we did last year, what we have seen was all about human to human or human to a system(machine). Yet Adam Ben-Dror has shown that the relationship in this project has no human inside the loop(although he did train the fish to follow his hand, but the main interaction is still between the fish and the world). Perhaps we could start thinking of how could we allow our creation to communicate with animals in a meaningful way. What if human does not matter the most in interaction design anymore, what could it be?

This project is also remarkably similar to a project of "iRobot Create". It is a Roomba kit made for hacking. In that project they put a boinc hamster inside the ball then attached onto the Roomba. The hamster then "control" the Roomba`s movement by running in different direction inside the ball. 

In conclusion, I think what we can start exploring is the interaction between animals and system. What it is to expect when the interaction is no longer on us but other animals in general. And which role will we be playing in the design of that eventually happened?