Designing for Animal-Human Interaction (AHIxD)

We ran a workshop “Animal Computer Interaction (ACI) & Designing for Animal Interaction (AXD)” at OZCHI 2017, and invited researchers and practitioners who work in some capacity with animals and want to expand their working methods to include learning more from the animals. More recently, a growing body of work focuses on both the reciprocal nature of our relationship with animals [1] as sentient beings in a designed world and as partner-users suffering the effects of our designing in the world [2]. We found that Animal Computer Interaction (ACI) systems have been mostly designed and evaluated driven by human-centered approaches [3]. However, there is a growing body of research and need for an animal-centered approach that would benefit both humans and animals. We envisage designing more usable interactive systems to that begin with working from the intelligence of the animal, in order to improve the quality of the overall system and learnt outcomes. We have begun to gather a body of researchers and practioners together to investigate and discuss their understandings, experiences, competencies and implementations for best practices for Animal Interaction Design.