Re-Centering Multispecies Practices: A Canine Interface for Cancer Detection 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.