With stress-tracking technologies becoming pervasive, a range of feedback displays has been explored to support engagement with stress data. However, most displays are studied in isolation, leaving limited understanding of how different forms of feedback shape engagement differently. This study compares three real-time stress feedback displays: screen-based quantitative, screen-based expressive, and physical expressive. Twenty-one participants took part in stress induction and recovery tasks to gain direct experience with each display, with data collected through surveys and semi-structured interviews. We found that different displays became associated with different modes of engagement: quantitative displays supported mobile, analytical use; screen-based expressive displays encouraged active monitoring; and physical expressive displays enabled peripheral awareness. We highlight the importance of balancing awareness with emotional experience, shaped by data representation and materiality. We challenge the assumption in personal informatics that more information or a more intuitive understanding is always beneficial, and offer a design framework for experiencing sensitive bio-signal feedback.

While zoos deploy technologies for animals’ enrichment and visitors’ education, little research has investigated how technology can support joint computer use by animals and people working together. To bridge this gap, we developed CreatureConnect, a distributed device with which lemurs and zoo visitors alike can control the intensity of sounds, smells, and visuals on either side of the enclosure boundary. Over 20 days of subsequent observation, we recorded 541 lemur-system interactions, observed 16,139 zoo visitors, and collected 696 sets of questionnaire responses to examine the effects of distributing control on both species across baseline, visitor-control-only, lemur-control-only, shared-control, and no-control conditions. While lemurs used CreatureConnect significantly less when controlling it alone, humans exhibited significantly greater engagement, education, empathy, and overall-experience value under shared-control conditions, which outperformed all other conditions. In light of the results and the fundamental role of interaction and interfaces in animal–computer and human–computer interaction, the paper examines its vital implications for between-species collaboration and control.

In Social Virtual Reality (VR), people use avatars to express identity. But how different social contexts influence the weighting of identity aspects people attribute to avatars, and the potential impact on avatar switching to their perception of identity consistency, remains unclear. To address this gap, our study employed a questionnaire-based survey with 100 participants. We found that people place greater emphasis on expressing their age, aesthetics and culture through avatars, relative to other identity aspects. Whereas attributes, such as one’s physical disabilities and mental health, are consistently hidden. Education and social status are context-dependent. Beyond adjusting these components, users also employed complete avatar switching as a strategy to meet social expectations and protect privacy. Furthermore, although people perceived a change in identity when switching avatars, their core identity was considered stable. This study advances knowledge of identity practices in digital spaces and offers insights for designing inclusive Social VR platforms that support multi-context identity expression.

Pre-sleep digital consumption is widespread. While it is a common concern for bedtime procrastination, recent research also highlights its importance in fulfilling various pre-sleep needs, such as claiming "me time". However, these benefits and underlying needs have largely been overlooked in the design of digital sleep interventions. In this paper, we present a co-design workshop with 16 participants, exploring a smart pillow that allows audio-based digital consumption through non-distracting interactions. We illustrate the smart pillow’s potential in resolving the tension between digital consumption and sleep transition to support sleep onset — the transition from wakefulness to sleep. Our work highlights how the pillow’s physical form affords audio consumption control with minimal effort, and positions sleep onset as a distinct design context that demands careful attention when designing for sleep. We offer design implications that leverage tangible and bodily interactions to accommodate the sensitive transitioning state during sleep onset.

Animals living alongside humans are navigating a world increasingly filled with technology, yet little is known about how they interface with these systems, whether designed for, with, or around them. Anchored in HCI and ranging across diverse fields, this scoping review analyzes nearly 800 research works to explore the diverse realities of animal-technology research, examining the who, what, why, and how of animal-technology entanglements. Our analysis revealed 11 research objectives and eight types of technologies across six animal contexts. By categorizing the literature based on authors’ aims and intended beneficiaries, we highlight trends, gaps, and ethical considerations. We find that most systems involve animals with limited potential for direct engagement or sense-making. We propose a framework to understand animals as users versus subjects of interactive systems, focusing on feedback, empirical testing, and projected animal benefits. Our findings offer a foundation to understand current and future animal technology research and the diversity of animal user experience.

Zoos aim to uphold high animal welfare standards while educating the public, yet the direct interactions that attract visitors can negatively impact the animals. Exploring technological solutions to reshape this human-animal relationship in zoos, we developed a novel device allowing lemurs to trigger olfactory, auditory, and visual stimuli in their enclosure. Over 63 days, lemurs engaged most with multimodal stimuli and with visual the least. We then created a similar device for zoo visitors to educate them about lemurs and their stimuli choices. Deploying for 20 days (no devices, lemur-only, visitor-only, and both devices), we examined the impact on visitor behaviour, education, empathy, and experience. From 968 questionnaires and 25,782 visitors, we found that using technology on the lemur and visitor sides jointly significantly enhanced all measured visitor factors, even if the visitors did not directly interact with the device or observe lemurs using theirs. This approach supports long-term conservation and visitor education efforts.

The concept of the animal Internet has flourished, with many conceptualisations proceeding from the premise that connecting animals online may enrich their social life. Yet we remain unaware of how – or even whether – online interactions (either live or with pre-recorded material) might affect how animals engage with other animals. We implemented a system for parrots to trigger live video calls with other birds or playback from a pre-recorded video call. The goal was to identify differences in engagement and behaviours. Over a six-month study, parrots triggered significantly more live calls and engaged longer in that setting relative to the playback condition, while the animals’ caregivers found greater value in the latter but preferred the live alternative for the birds under their care. The results begin to question what animals make of online remote connections, putting forward considerations as to how the internet can affect animals’ experiences.

Computer technology for animals is typically oriented toward isolated individuals, seldom attending to such group-living factors as accommodating differences between individuals. To address this shortcoming of research and practice, the authors designed and developed an audio-based system that lets lemurs in group accommodation voluntarily trigger audio via a novel device dubbed LemurLounge and listen to it on their own. This interactive system was deployed for 14 lemurs, of three species (black-and-white, brown, and ring-tailed), in their normal habitat. The device’s presence clearly influenced lemurs’ visits to the relevant portion of the enclosure. Alongside a general preference for audio over silence, assessment of individual- and species-level differences revealed significant differences at both levels, though no particular sound type (rainfall, traffic, either upbeat or relaxing music, or white noise) was favoured. The findings and design work highlight the need for customisable and adaptive computer technology for animals living in group settings, with important implications for lemurs and other primates, humans included.

Touchscreen devices, ubiquitous in humans’ day-to-day life, offer a promising avenue for animal enrichment. With advanced cognitive abilities, keen visual perception, and adeptness to engage with capacitive screens using dexterous tongues, parrots are uniquely positioned to benefit from this technology. Additionally, pet parrots often lack appropriate stimuli, supporting the need for inexpensive solutions using off-the-shelf devices. However, the current human-centric interaction design standards of tablet applications do not optimally cater to the tactile affordances and ergonomic needs of parrots. To address this, we conducted a study with 20 pet parrots, examining their tactile interactions with touchscreens and evaluating the applicability of existing HCI interaction models. Our research highlights key ergonomic characteristics unique to parrots, which include pronounced multi-tap behavior, a critical size threshold for touch targets, and greater effectiveness of larger targets over closer proximity. Based on these insights, we propose guidelines for tablet-based enrichment systems for companion parrots.

Health data user engagement, particularly with stress data, remains a challenge despite the widespread use of self-tracking products, like smartwatches and smart bracelets. Stress data engagement is crucial to the early detection and intervention of long-term stress which could cause harmful health effects. This paper explores the design of tangible displays to enhance engagement with self-tracked stress data. We conducted two co-design workshops in which participants were invited to design and draw sketches of stress displays for three different contexts. The workshops revealed many innovative ideas for using everyday spaces and materials as an interface to structure user interactions with the data, aimed at increasing awareness of stress data and management strategies while addressing various concerns associated with how the data is displayed. By focusing on stress data, this study highlights important opportunities to use everyday spaces as an interface for health data engagement.

Over 20 million parrots are kept as pets in the US, often lacking appropriate stimuli to meet their high social, cognitive, and emotional needs. After reviewing bird perception and agency literature, we developed an approach to allow parrots to engage in video-calling other parrots. Following a pilot experiment and expert survey, we ran a three-month study with 18 pet birds to evaluate the potential value and usability of a parrot-parrot video-calling system. We assessed the system in terms of perception, agency, engagement, and overall perceived benefits. With 147 bird-triggered calls, our results show that 1) every bird used the system, 2) most birds exhibited high motivation and intentionality, and 3) all caretakers reported perceived benefits, some arguably life-transformative, such as learning to forage or even to fly by watching others. We report on individual insights and propose considerations regarding ethics and the potential of parrot video-calling for enrichment.

Although much work has focused on designing touch interfaces for primates, little is known about how physical computer buttons for monkeys would look. Here, we employ the rapid prototyping method commonly used in human–computer interaction to design tangible buttons for monkeys allowing them to interact with computer enrichment. Our findings reflect on the process of altering rapid prototyping from humans to animals and how computer buttons for monkeys might look. On this basis, we make suggestions for monkey buttons, highlighting colour and pull/swing over push/touch interactions. We also reflect on lessons learned from transferring prototyping across species, such as the need to iterate on a few variables and for initial prototypes to be varied, and speculate on how to balance the designer (human) and user (animals) needs. More broadly, this paper builds upon HCI prototyping techniques for unconventional users, creating a method for rapid iterative prototyping with animals.

Though computer systems have entered widespread use for animals' enrichment in zoos, no interactive computer systems suited to giraffes have yet been developed. Hence, which input modes or audio stimuli giraffes might best utilise remains unknown. To address this issue and probe development of such systems alongside the animals themselves and zookeepers, researchers gathered requirements from the keepers and from prototyping with giraffes, then created two interfaces -- one touch-based and one proximity-based -- that play giraffe-humming audio or white noise when activated. Over two months of observation, giraffes utilised the proximity-based system more frequently than the touch-based one but in shorter episodes. Secondly, the study highlighted the significance of considering user-specific needs in computer systems' development: the lack of preference shown for any specific audio type indicates that the audio stimuli chosen were inappropriate for these giraffes. In addition, the paper articulates several lessons that can be drawn from human--computer interaction when one develops systems for animals and, in turn, what the findings presented mean for humans.

Interactive systems were built to give monkeys a choice over when and where to trigger stimuli as a way to control their environment to improve their welfare indices. Typically, systems only support the triggering of one stimulus – either audio or visual. In this study, a system was developed for monkeys that allowed them to choose between multiple auditory and visual stimuli. Utilising this system over several weeks, we found that monkeys would interact and choose between different stimuli, though not significantly, and that sakis triggered audio stimuli twice as much as visual stimuli. The monkeys interacted with audio and visual stimuli differently over time, spotlighting how we can define and measure the interactivity and user experience for monkey–computer interfaces. Furthermore, the monkeys’ interactions, while initially increasing, declined over the study period, which indicated a novelty effect. This paper builds upon computer systems for primates by uncovering answers to key questions regarding creating and defining interactive systems according to a user’s choices.

Zoos have been consistently popular with young visitors, helping educate children in animal conservation. However, zoos’ typical strategies employ interactive signs and videos, which children largely ignore. In pursuit of new engagement methods, children were invited to design for animals via ZooDesign, a gamified imaginative design approach centred on an educational card and role-playing game, ZooDesign assists children in envisaging how animals can use technologies, by exploring their welfare needs and humans’ involvement. Many children designed with the animals’ well-being in mind. Analysis of their creations and role-play interviews revealed that the method constitutes a good process but not all designs were appropriate for use with animals. Furthermore, few designs included the children themselves; most emphasised zookeeper and researcher roles instead. Building on child-computer interaction methods for zoo-based education contexts, the research raises key questions involved in educating children about animals.

Over the past decade, many systems have been developed for humans to remotely connect to their pets at home. Yet little attention has been paid to how animals can control such systems and what the implications are of animals using internet systems. This paper explores the creation of a video call device to allow a dog to remotely call their human, giving the animal control and agency over technology in their home. After building and prototyping a novel interaction method over several weeks and iterations, we test our system with a dog and a human. Analysing our experience and data, we reflect on power relations, how to quantify an animal's user experience and what interactive internet systems look like with animal users. This paper builds upon Human-Computer Interaction methods for unconventional users, uncovering key questions that advance the creation of animal-to-human interfaces and animal internet devices.

Various mobile technologies proofed to enhance peoples collocated social interactions. In particular, user-generated presentations of self have proven beneficial, albeit in specific social settings. This field study interviewed 30 participants for their attitudes towards personal sharing in six public settings in a Nordic metropolitan area. We asked participants to draw what they want to share on an attachable paper sticker. We observed retention towards sharing in places with a more heterogeneous audience. Predominantly people’s attitudes towards sharing depended on an individual’s current context. Our results highlight the symbolic act of sharing in public as a factor for placing personal public displays. Further, we suggest leveraging the different strategies of extroverts and introverts for collocated social interactions.

How humans use computers has evolved from human-machine interfaces to human-human computer mediated communication. Whilst the field of animal-computer interaction has roots in HCI, technology developed in this area currently only supports animal-computer communication. This design fiction paper presents animal-animal connected interfaces, using dogs as an instance. Through a co-design workshop, we created six proposals. The designs focused on what a dog internet could look like and how interactions might be presented. Analysis of the narratives and conceived designs indicated that participants' concerns focused around asymmetries within the interaction. This resulted in the use of objects seen as familiar to dogs. This was conjoined with interest in how to initiate and end interactions, which was often achieved through notification systems. This paper builds upon HCI methods for unconventional users, and applies a design fiction approach to uncover key questions towards the creation of animal-to-animal interfaces.

Technologies that augment face-to-face interactions with a digital sense of self have been used to support conversations. That work has employed one homogenous technology, either 'off-the-shelf' or with a bespoke prototype, across all participants. Beyond speculative instances, it is unclear what technology individuals themselves would choose, if any, to augment their social interactions; what influence it may exert; or how use of heterogeneous devices may affect the value of this augmentation. This is important, as the devices that we use directly affect our behaviour, influencing affordances and how we engage in social interactions. Through a study of 28 participants, we compared head-mounted display, smartphones, and smartwatches to support digital augmentation of self during face-to-face interactions within a group. We identified a preference among participants for head-mounted displays to support privacy, while smartwatches and smartphones better supported conversational events (such as grounding and repair), along with group use through screen-sharing. Accordingly, we present software and hardware design recommendations and user interface guidelines for integrating a digital form of self into face-to-face conversations.