Parrots have shown the ability to interact with tablet-based speech boards to engage in parrot-human communication. However, the influence of speech boards’ interface design on avian usability and, thus, on speech boards’ potential to optimally support parrot-human communication, is yet to be explored. As a first step in this direction, we report on a longitudinal four-year in-the-wild study of a Goffin's Cockatoo's interactions with three successive speech board interfaces. The study explored, for the first time, possible relations between interface design variables typically considered for human speech board users - type, granularity, repertoire and arrangement of speech board representations - and the bird's selections under different conditions and across different design iterations. Based on our findings, we contribute key considerations and hypotheses to inform further research into the relevance of interface design choices for the avian usability of speech boards and, thus, their potential to optimally support functional parrot-human communication.

While ethical challenges are widely discussed in HCI, far less is reported about the ethical processes that researchers routinely navigate. We reflect on a multispecies project that negotiated an especially complex ethical approval process. Cat Royale was an artist-led exploration of creating an artwork to engage audiences in exploring trust in autonomous systems. The artwork took the form of a robot that played with three cats. Gaining ethical approval required an extensive dialogue with three Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) covering computer science, veterinary science and animal welfare, raising tensions around the welfare of the cats, perceived benefits and appropriate methods, and reputational risk to the University. To reveal these tensions we introduce beneficiary-epistemology space, that makes explicit who benefits from research (humans or animals) and underlying epistemologies. Positioning projects and IRBs in this space can help clarify tensions and highlight opportunities to recruit additional expertise.

We reflect on the design of a multispecies world centred around a bespoke enclosure in which three cats and a robot arm coexist for six hours a day during a twelve-day installation as part of an artist-led project. In this paper, we present the project’s design process, encompassing various interconnected components, including the cats, the robot and its autonomous systems, the custom end-effectors and robot attachments, the diverse roles of the humans-in-the-loop, and the custom-designed enclosure. Subsequently, we provide a detailed account of key moments during the deployment and discuss the design implications for future multispecies systems. Specifically, we argue that designing the technology and its interactions is not sufficient, but that it is equally important to consider the design of the ‘world’ in which the technology operates. Finally, we highlight the necessity of human involvement in areas such as breakdown recovery, animal welfare, and their role as audience.

This is a demonstration of how to use a deck of Concept Craft Cards that represent the first iteration of a toolkit for Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) developers. The cards will be available to share, discuss and deploy online in relation to a series of non-human client briefs. At the top conceptual level, we offer suggestions for ACI developers embarking on a new design journey; the next conceptual level considers user experience and offers our recommendations for interaction design that values cognitive and sensory enrichment; at a practical level, we provide a set of topic cards, to be used during development to support the realization of design concepts through crafting and tinkering.

The aim of this research was to discover if artificial neural networks can be used to classify pressure sensor data generated by medical detection dogs as they sniff biological samples. A detection dog can be trained to recognise the odour emitted by one of a wide range of diseases such as prostate cancer, malaria or, potentially, COVID-19. The dog searches a row of sample pots and indicates a positive sample by sitting in front of it. This offers a non-invasive means of diagnosing the specific cancer or disease that the dog has been trained to recognise. For this study, pressure sensors were attached to the sample pots to generate time series data pertaining to the dog’s searching behaviour as they press their nose against the sample pot to sniff its content. Automatic classification could provide a second form of indication, to support or refute the dog’s explicit signal (to sit at a positive sample), which is not always correct. Ultimately, classification software could eliminate the need for the dog to perform an indication gesture, making the dog’s task easier and training quicker. Four different neural network architectures were evaluated: multilayer perceptron (MLP), a convolutional neural network (CNN), a fully convolutional network (FCN) and ResNet (a deep convolutional neural network). Each model was trained to classify the pressure data generated by medical detection dogs. To achieve a useful level of accuracy, it was found that the models needed to be trained using only those data samples where the dog had correctly classified the scent sample. Model hyperparameters were tuned to improve accuracy. We found that the best performing model was MLP. When tested on previously unseen data, where the dog was not always correct, the classification performance of the MLP approached that of the medical detection dogs. For our particular dataset, the model’s true positive rate (i.e. recall) was 59%, matching that of the dogs. The model’s true negative rate was 79%, compared to the dogs’ 91%.

Species-specific aesthetics is an important consideration for interaction designers working with animals. The paper explores the concept of species-specific aesthetics with particular reference to elephants. Applying existing aesthetic dimensions and design principles to the challenge of designing interactive enrichment for them, we show how the insights gained can inform more than human-centered design in different settings. We offer a multi-faceted, multi-sensory lens for examining an animal-centred aesthetic experience of technology.

Animals can be negatively affected by wearable tracking devices, even those marketed as ?animal friendly' and increasingly used with companion animals, such as cats. To understand the wearer experience of cats fitted with popular GPS trackers, we measured the behavior of 13 feline participants while they were wearing the devices during a field study. The aim of our behavioral analysis was twofold: investigating potential signs of discomfort generated by the devices to evaluate the impact that such interventions have on cat wearers; identifying wearability flaws that might account for the observed impact and wearability requirements to improve the design of the devices. Based on our findings, we propose a set of requirements that should inform the design of trackers to afford better wearability and thus provide better wearer experience for cat wearers.

In this paper we present an approach to designing wearer-centered biotelemetry for non-human (and human) animal wearers. Drawing from fundamental values and principles of user-centered design, we describe a wearer-centered framework to heuristically establish design requirements, which was used during a series of workshops to perform a requirements analysis for a cat-tracking device. The resulting requirements informed a feline-centered prototype whose wearability was evaluated with cat wearers. Compared to the wearability of previously tested off-the-shelf devices, our findings show an improvement and suggest that our framework-based approach can help design teams with a range of skills to systematically design for wearability.

Interactive technology has become integral part of daily life for both humans and animals, with animals often interacting with technologized environments on behalf of humans. For some, animals' participation in the design process is essential to design technology that can adequately support their activities. For others, animals' inability to understand and control design activities inevitably stands in the way of multispecies participatory practices. Here, we consider the essential elements of participation within interspecies interactions and illustrate its emergence, in spite of contextual constraints and asymmetries. To move beyond anthropomorphic notions of participation, and consequent anthropocentric practices, we propose a broader participatory model based on indexical semiosis, volition and choice; and we highlight dimensions that could define inclusive participatory practices more resilient to the diversity of understandings and goals among part-taking agents, and better able to account for the contribution of diverse, multispecies agents in interaction design and beyond.

Participatory Design with children strives to broaden the perspective of and increase empathy in design for the needs and desires of children by giving children a voice in the design process. The exact nature of the role played by children in the design process (e.g. user, informant, co-designer) and how much voice they are actually given has been the subject of a long and heated debate in the IDC community. The emerging field of Animal Computer Interaction, which seeks to empower animals through the participatory design of user-centered technology, offers an interesting opportunity for a comparative analysis. Indeed, working with animals poses many of the challenges also posed by working with children, due to similarities with regards to cognitive capabilities or attention span at particular developmental stages, and with regards to the designer's ability to communicate with them. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from the fields of animal and child computer interaction to explore similarities and difference in the challenges they face, the methods they use and the lessons they have learnt, to date, with the objective of gaining a better understanding of these important aspects and setting an agenda for further collaboration and study between the two communities.

We conducted a short study investigating the pressure patterns produced by cancer detection dogs via a canine-centered interface while searching samples of amyl acetate. We advance previous work by providing further insights into the potential of the approach for supporting and partly automating the practice of cancer detection with dogs.

We report on participatory design research where interaction designers, and canine behavioral specialists, together with their cancer detection dogs, teamed up to better support the dogs' life-saving work. We discuss interspecies communication challenges in cancer detection training, requiring the dogs to use human signaling conventions that perturb their detection work. We describe our effort to develop a technology that could resolve those challenges, and how in the process our design focus gradually shifted from a human-centered to a canine-centered interaction model. The resulting interface, based on honest signaling, re-centers cancer detection practices on the dogs themselves, enabling them to better express their potential as cancer detection workers; it also provides a model for re-thinking human-computer interactions.

In this research we developed an alarm system that enables assistance dogs to call for help on behalf of their vulnerable owners in an emergency, involving the end users (both assistance dogs and their owners) directly in the entire design process. Here we present a high-fidelity prototype of a user-friendly canine alarm system. In developing the system, we sought to understand the level of support required for a canine user to successfully interact with an interface, finding that the type of emergency a dog is faced with may vary widely and that consequently dogs may have to act on behalf of their assisted owners with varying degrees of autonomy. We also explored the process of conducting usability testing with both canine and human participants, seeking to identify where requirements of one species may overlap with, or diverge from, the other.

Many people with Diabetes live with the continuous threat of hypoglycemic attacks and the danger of going into coma. Diabetes Alert Dogs are trained to detect the onset of an attack before the condition of the human handler they are paired with deteriorates, giving them time to take action. We investigated requirements for designing an alarm system allowing dogs to remotely call for help when their human falls unconscious before being able to react to an alert. Through a multispecies ethnographic approach we focus on the requirements for a physical canine user interface, involving dogs, their handlers and specialist dog trainers in the design process. We discuss tensions between the requirements for canine and the human users, argue the need for increased sensitivity towards the needs of individual dogs that goes beyond breed specific physical characteristics, and reflect on how we can move from designing for dogs to designing with dogs.

Whilst the ubicomp community has successfully embraced a number of societal challenges for human benefit, including healthcare and sustainability, the well-being of other animals is hitherto underrepresented. We argue that ubicomp technologies, including sensing and monitoring devices as well as tangible and embodied interfaces, could make a valuable contribution to animal welfare. This paper particularly focuses on dogs in kenneled accommodation, as we investigate the opportunities and challenges for a smart kennel aiming to foster canine welfare. We conducted an in-depth ethnographic study of a dog rehoming center over four months; based on our findings, we propose a welfare-centered framework for designing smart environments, integrating monitoring and interaction with information management. We discuss the methodological issues we encountered during the research and propose a smart ethnographic approach for similar projects.

The domestic use of tracking technology with pets is on the rise, yet is under-researched. We investigate how tracking practices reconfigure human-dog relationships changing both humans and dogs. We question the sensemaking mechanisms by which both humans and dogs engage in context-based meaningful exchanges via the technology's mediation. We show how an indexical semiotic perspective could inform the development of interspecies technology. Finally, we discuss the methodological issues raised by doing research with animals and propose an interspecies semiotics which integrates animal companions and animal researchers' accounts into ethnographic observation.

A growing body of research has been exploring the use of control mechanisms to address the privacy concerns raised by location-tracking technology. We report on a qualitative study of two family groups who used a custom-built tracking application for an extended period of time. Akin to sociological breaching experiments, the study focuses on the interferences between location tracking and relationship management. We analyze the tensions that can arise between affordances of the technology and uses that the contracts between family members legitimize. We describe how, by fostering misperceptions and 'nudging' behaviors, location-tracking technology can generate anxieties and conflicts even in close relationships. We discuss their vulnerability to the overreaching effects of tracking, against which the use of mechanisms such as location-sharing preferences and feedback may not be socially viable.

How can we best explore the range of users' reactions when developing future technologies that may be controversial, such as personal healthcare systems? Our approach -- ContraVision -- uses futuristic videos, or other narrative forms, that convey either negative or positive aspects of the proposed technology for the same scenarios. We conducted a user study to investigate what range of responses the different versions elicited. Our findings show that the use of two systematically comparable representations of the same technology can elicit a wider spectrum of reactions than a single representation can. We discuss why this is so and the value of obtaining breadth in user feedback for potentially controversial technologies.

We present a qualitative study examining Location-Based Service (LBS) usage by families and how it is integrated into everyday life. We establish that LBS, when used for tracking purposes, affords a means of digital nurturing; that said, we discuss how LBS surveillance has the potential to undermine trust and serve as a detriment to nurturing.

Mobile privacy concerns are central to Ubicomp and yet remain poorly understood. We advocate a diversified approach, enabling the cross-interpretation of data from complementary methods. However, mobility imposes a number of limitations on the methods that can be effectively employed. We discuss how we addressed this problem in an empirical study of mobile social networking. We report on how, by combining a variation of experience sampling and contextual interviews, we have started focusing on a notion of context in relation to privacy, which is subjectively defined by emerging socio-cultural knowledge, functions, relations and rules. With reference to Gieryn's sociological work, we call this place, as opposed to a notion of context that is objectively defined by physical and factual elements, which we call space. We propose that the former better describes the context for mobile privacy.

No abstract available.

This article characterizes key weaknesses in the ability of current digital libraries to support scholarly inquiry, and as a way to address these, proposes computational services grounded in semiformal models of the naturalistic argumentation commonly found in research literatures. It is argued that a design priority is to balance formal expressiveness with usability, making it critical to coevolve the modeling scheme with appropriate user interfaces for argument construction and analysis. We specify the requirements for an argument modeling scheme for use by untrained researchers and describe the resulting ontology, contrasting it with other domain modeling and semantic web approaches, before discussing passive and intelligent user interfaces designed to support analysts in the construction, navigation, and analysis of scholarly argument structures in a Web-based environment. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 22: 17–47, 2007.