FishView

What the client needed

We worked with Mariia on this. FishView had the idea and a rough proof that it worked: a clear dome sitting in a garden pond, held full of water by negative pressure, that fish swim up into of their own accord. Above the waterline, in the round, visible.

An idea that works once in a garden is not a product. They needed it to be something that could be manufactured, boxed, shipped to a stranger, assembled on a pond edge they had never seen, and left outdoors for years.

What made it hard

A column of water suspended above a pond is a balance. It stays up because of pressure, which means the whole assembly has to hold a seal permanently, in a garden, through temperature swings, algae, and whatever a curious fish or heron does to it. Any leak and the effect is gone.

The base is the other half of the problem. Ponds are not flat and no two are the same depth at the edge, so the dome cannot sit on a fixed stand — it has to adjust, stay rigid once set, and not corrode.

What we did

We took on the product engineering, against a brief with five demands that pull against each other: strong and long-lasting, modular, easy to manufacture, able to fit inside a shipping box, affordable — and good-looking.

That covers the dome itself, the adjustable aluminium base, and the 3D-printed connectors that tie the two together. Along the way it also meant solving how the leg lengths adjust, how the lights and the bubble level attach, and how to keep the whole structure thin enough that a fish still has room to swim in.

Most of the work was in the joints. The connectors carry real load and have to lock reliably by hand, without tools, by someone following a sheet of paper.

That took iteration — printing a version, loading it, finding where it flexed or where the fit was too tight to assemble wet-handed, and printing again.

The system was designed to be modular so one set of parts covers different pond depths and dome sizes, rather than manufacturing a separate product per variant.

Then it went in the water, because a garden pond does things a workshop bench does not.

Working with the client

FishView reviewed printed parts in person throughout. For a physical product that is worth more than any amount of rendering — you find out in a minute whether a part feels solid or cheap, and whether an assembly step makes sense to someone who did not design it.

Where it stands

FishView is in production and selling. The team is based between the Netherlands and Ukraine.