The glass as a listening device.
When used as a listening instrument, a glass is no longer a mere container. By amplifying sounds and voices through a surface, it becomes a conduit between two seemingly distant environments. Like a glass, aquarium walls implement a material and ontological separation between human and marine creatures, highlighting the relationship we have established over time with these living beings, transformed into taxonomical units.
In "The Aquarium is a Listening Glass", nine short, non-linear stories—set amid scientific archives, underwater research stations, natural history museums, national aquaria and oceanic infrastructure—evoke the glass as a listening device to present singular relationships between humans and fish that would otherwise go unheard. In this paradigm shift, design plays a fundamental role in conceiving the object (and the book) as a sensory device to glimpse new forms of mediation, to generate alliances, and also to promote the potential for a thriving and vital world.
Louise E. Carver is a critical geographer and political ecologist interested in the ways that knowledge, politics, technologies shape interactions between environment and society. Her transdisciplinary work explores the governance and policy practices of human and environmental systems along with creative methods that both represent and intervene in them. She leads a research programme on Convivial Conservation and the Blue Economy at TBA21-Academy and is Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University, UK.

Angela Rui is a curator and design researcher based in Milan. A former designer, journalist, and PhD in Exhibition Design, Rui currently contributes—through mentoring, curating, and writing—to rethinking the role of design as a critical practice in support of eco-social renewal.