Design Fellowship 2020
Aran Dasan, SafetyNet Technologies
SafetyNet Technologies, co-founded by Aran and Dan Watson, are developing a new technology for ‘precision fishing’, combining concepts from precision agriculture and IoT, in response to the impending scarcity of marine resources. “Enki” is a technology based on frequent and high definition observation and measurement of the oceans, turning fishing gears into ocean sensors and fishing vessels into scientific platforms to affordably measure the entire ocean.
Enki is a toolkit of devices that attaches to and converts fishing nets into these ocean sensors. The solution exploits the ubiquitous nature of global fishing operations to comprehensively measure the marine resources for all the world’s oceans – previously such extensive data collection has demanded multiple specialised vessels. The rich data set that Enki gathers correlates key oceanographic variables, like temperature and salinity, with fishing outcomes, supporting dynamic fisheries management decision-making and on-the-spot fishing decisions by skippers to avoid bycatch. Scientific and policy communities, too, can use this surveillance to shape their policies and interventions.
The Fellowship will support the running of workshops involving end-users and combine a considerable amount of human-centred, marine biology and technical research. The project will span several disciplines: marine biology, electronic and mechanical engineering, data science, human-centred and service design.
Aran and Dan held 1851 Industrial Design Studentships in 2010 and 2009 respectively.
