A cat café is a themed café where people can interact with cats. These cafés sometimes raise ethical concerns about commodifying cats for human entertainment. Feline Space attempts to address these concerns through an experimental spatial design that invites human visitors to actually inhabit the spaces of cats. It functions both as a piece of furniture for humans and a built environment for cats. In this “cat space,” humans are guided to crawl down, twist their bodies, and explore the movements of cats. When humans are guided to behave like cats, will the boundary between a human’s space and a cat’s space become obscured? Through their “animalistic” behavior, will people develop different understandings towards human-animal relations? By documenting human and cat behavior inside the experimental prototypes, I seek new possibilities of spatial designs for human and animal users in a public context.
