Animals under human care are exposed to a potentially large range of both familiar and unfamiliar humans. Human-animal interactions vary across settings, and individuals, with the nature of the interaction being affected by a suite of different intrinsic and extrinsic factors. These interactions can be described as positive, negative or neutral.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe involvement of animals in research procedures that can harm them and to which they are deemed unable to consent raises fundamental ethical dilemmas. While current ethical review processes emphasize the application of the 3Rs (Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement), grounded in a human-centered utilitarian ethical approach, a comprehensive ethical review also involves a harm-benefit analysis and the consideration of wider ethical issues. Nevertheless, to our knowledge, approaches are still needed to facilitate the integrative assessment and iterative revision of research designs to improve their ethical value or to identify cases in which using animals is irremediably unethical.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDesigners and researchers who work with animals need to employ an array of ethical competencies to guarantee the welfare of animals taking part in animal-centered research. The emerging field of Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI), which deals with the design of animal-centered interactive systems, considers ethics a fundamental concern when working with animals, and ACI researchers have proposed ethics frameworks in response to these concerns. Ethical approaches proposed within the field tend to be normative but, on their own, norms may not be sufficient to support designers who will inevitably face unexpected and ethically charged situations as the research progresses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrivacy is an essential consideration when designing interactive systems for humans. However, at a time when interactive technologies are increasingly targeted at non-human animals and deployed within multispecies contexts, the question arises as to whether we should extend privacy considerations to other animals. To address this question, we revisited early scholarly work on privacy, which examines privacy dynamics in non-human animals (henceforth "animals").
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper investigates the potential for using technology to support the development of sensory and cognitive enrichment activities for captive elephants. It explores the usefulness of applying conceptual frameworks from interaction design and game design to the problem of developing species-specific smart toys that promote natural behaviours and provide stimulation. We adopted a Research through Design approach, and describe how scientific inquiry supported our design process, while the creation of artefacts guided our investigations into possible future solutions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF