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Understanding animals: a critical challenge in ACI

Published: 29 September 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We present a qualitative content analysis of visual-verbal social media posts, where ordinary dog owners pretend to be their canine, to identify meaningful facets in their dogs' life-worlds, e.g. pleasures of human-dog relation, dog-dog relations, food etc. We use this knowledge to inform design of "quantified pets". The study targets a general problem in Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI), i.e. to understand animals when designing "for" them, although lacking a common language. Several approaches, e.g. ethnography and participatory design, have been appropriated from HCI without exhausting the issue. We argue for a methodological creativity and pluralism by suggesting an additional approach drawing on "kinesthetic empathy". It implies to understand animals by empathizing with their bodily movements over time and decoding the realities of their life-worlds. This, and other related approaches, has inspired animal researchers to conduct more or less radical participant observations during extensive duration to understand the perspective of the other. We suggest that dog owners whom share their lives with their dogs already possess a similar understanding as these experts, and thus uphold important experiences of canine life that could be used to understand individual dogs and inspire design.

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  • (2024)Behind the Pup-ularity Curtain: Understanding the Motivations, Challenges, and Work Performed in Creating and Managing Pet Influencer AccountsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642367(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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  • (2022)Expanding AestheticsFrontiers in Veterinary Science10.3389/fvets.2022.8550879Online publication date: 4-May-2022
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cover image ACM Other conferences
NordiCHI '18: Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
September 2018
1002 pages
ISBN:9781450364379
DOI:10.1145/3240167
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 29 September 2018

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Author Tags

  1. animal-computer interaction
  2. dog blogs
  3. kinesthetic empathy
  4. pet dogs
  5. quantified pets
  6. social media

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NordiCHI'18
NordiCHI'18: Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
September 29 - October 3, 2018
Oslo, Norway

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NordiCHI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 59 of 240 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)Behind the Pup-ularity Curtain: Understanding the Motivations, Challenges, and Work Performed in Creating and Managing Pet Influencer AccountsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642367(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Meowmy, Pawrents and Menschenwelpen ‘human puppies’: Linguistic practices of Doing Interspecies Families on German InstagramDiscourse, Context & Media10.1016/j.dcm.2024.10080060(100800)Online publication date: Aug-2024
  • (2022)Expanding AestheticsFrontiers in Veterinary Science10.3389/fvets.2022.8550879Online publication date: 4-May-2022
  • (2022)From human-centric digital health to digital One Health: Crucial new directions for mutual flourishingDIGITAL HEALTH10.1177/205520762211291038(205520762211291)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2022
  • (2022)A Critical Literature Review for Equal Participation in Human-Animal Interactions in DesignCompanion Publication of the 2022 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3500868.3559467(45-49)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2022

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