BETA Fish
Speculative App created from a brief set in collaboration between Goldsmiths University of London and James Foster, industrial designer for Apple.
BETA Fish is a group proposal for a speculative app which uses citizen science and data visualisation to make communities more aware of the health of their waterways. The sewers live a life of wonder, constantly receiving artefacts from the overground. The health of the sewers is a direct reflection of the lifestyles and habits of its community. With the use of citizen science, our group idealised a kit that would allow the public to gather data from their waterways. This playful data would then be uploaded to the app BETA Fish, which would translate the chemicals into different shapes and colours of a fish- that would then become a visual equivalent of the health of their waterways.
With the BETA Fish application, you are confronted by a creature that is fed the collected community data - it will mutate and adapt to determine its shape and structure based on the information it receives. Human behaviour becomes the variable that affects the looks of the fish. The outcome of this interface involves both the practical aspect of readable data visualisation as well as a better understanding of our ecological environment.
