Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/2995257.2995382acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesaciConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper

Unleashed enthusiasm: ethical reflections on harms, benefits, and animal-centered aims of ACI

Published: 15 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

This paper offers an interdisciplinary approach to ethical questions concerning animal welfare in Animal Computer Interaction (ACI), combining concepts from animal ethics and the empirical foundations of ethology and animal welfare science. First, we reflect on the self-proclaimed ethical positions of ACI, its responsibilities toward human and nonhuman animals, and potential conflicts in practical application. We then explore the central aims of ACI to improve welfare, benefit animals, and improve the human-animal relationship. There are exciting potentials for animals to benefit from ACI; nevertheless, there are some methodological problems given the non-speciesist aspirations of ACI. There is a need for a greater focus on data collection, attention to long-term implications of ACI technology use, assessment of animal time budgets, and careful interpretation of preference tests. Finally, we briefly discuss the opportunity for critical anthropomorphism to strengthen the methodology of ACI.

References

[1]
David Arney. 1986. What is Animal Welfare and How is it Assessed? 42. (1986), 311--316.
[2]
Frederik Aspling. 2015. Animals, Plants, People and Digital Technology : Exploring and Understanding Multispecies-Computer Interaction. In Postgraduate Consortium: The Second International Congress on Animal Computer Interaction hosted under Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology. 1--4.
[3]
American Psychiatric Association and others. 2013. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-5®). American Psychiatric Pub.
[4]
The Open University Animal-Computer Interaction Blog. Ethics. (Ethics). http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/ACI/?page_id=15
[5]
D. M. Broom. 1996. Animal Welfare Defined in Terms of Attempts to Cope with the Environment. (1996).
[6]
Gordon M. Burghardt. 1990. Animal suffering, critical anthropomorphism, and reproductive rights. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 01 (1990), 14--15.
[7]
Gordon M Burghardt. 2007. Critical anthropomorphism,uncritical anthropocentrism, and naïve nominalism. Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews 2 (2007), 136--138.
[8]
Paul Cairns and Anna L. Cox. 2011. Research Methods for Human Computer Interaction. May 2016 (2011).
[9]
Shaun Lawson Clara Mancini, Chadwick Wingrave and Frank Noz. 2012. ACI SIG at CHI'12: meeting report. Technical Report. The Open University, University of Central Florida, University of Lincoln, FrankNoz.com.
[10]
Farm Animal Welfare Council. 1992. The five freedoms. Farm Animal Welfare Council London.
[11]
Nicholas H Dodman and Louis Shuster. 2005. Animal Models of Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior: A Neurobiological and Ethological Perspective. In Concepts and controversies in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Springer, 53--71.
[12]
K. Dürnberger, C., Grimm, H., Weich. 2015. Ethik in der amtstierärztlichen Praxis. Ein Wegweiser. Technical Report. Wien. 69--72 pages. papers2://publication/uuid/8AA58F0B-CAD3-46D2-BF74-9A73CA42DD44
[13]
Gary Lawrence Francione and Robert Garner. 2010. The animal rights debate: Abolition or regulation? Columbia University Press.
[14]
Julie Hecht, Ádám Miklósi, and Márta Gácsi. 2012. Behavioral assessment and owner perceptions of behaviors associated with guilt in dogs. Applied animal behaviour science 139, 1 (2012), 134--142.
[15]
Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas. 2013. Animal Computer Interaction ( ACI ) investigation on canine visual and audio attentiveness while interacting with video stimulus in a Human Computer Interaction ( HCI ) framework. (2013), 1--131.
[16]
Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas. 2015. Creating Meaningful Interaction with Dogs and Computer Machinery. In Proceedings of BCS Interactions HCI Summer Doctoral Consortium. 1--2.
[17]
Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas and Janet C. Read. 2014. Who Is Really In The Center Of Dog Computer Design?. In Proceedings of the 2014 Workshops on Advances in Computer Entertainment Conference - ACE '14 Workshops. 1--5.
[18]
Margit Bak Jensen and Lene Juul Pedersen. 2008. Using motivation tests to assess ethological needs and preferences. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 113, 4 (2008), 340--356.
[19]
Peter H. Kahn, Rachel L. Severson, and Jolina H. Ruckert. 2009. The human relation with nature and technological nature. Current Directions in Psychological Science 18, 1 (2009), 37--42.
[20]
Dongwann Kang and Kyunghyun Yoon. 2015. Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2015. In International Federation for Information Processing 2015, K et al Chorianopoulos (Ed.), Vol. 9353. 238--251.
[21]
Shaun Lawson, Ben Kirman, Conor Linehan, Tom Feltwell, and Lisa Hopkins. 2015. Problematising Upstream Technology through Speculative Design: The Case of Quantified Cats and Dogs. In Proc. CHI 2015. 2663--2672.
[22]
Clara Mancini. 2013. Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI): changing perspective on HCI, participation and sustainability. In CHI 2013. 2227--2236.
[23]
Robert E. McGrath. 2009. Species-appropriate computer mediated interaction. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI EA '09. 2529--2534.
[24]
K Michel and M Scherk. 2012. From Problem to Success Feline weight loss programs that work. Journal of feline medicine and surgery 14 (2012), 327--336.
[25]
Evgeny Morozov. 2013. To save everything, click here: Technology, solutionism, and the urge to fix problems that don't exist. Penguin UK.
[26]
Steve North. 2016. Do Androids dream of electric steeds? interactions 23, 2 (feb 2016), 50--53.
[27]
C Nussbaum Martha. 2006. Frontiers of justice: disability, nationality, species membership. (2006).
[28]
Francisco B Ortega, Jonatan R Ruiz, and Michael Sjostrom. 2007. Physical activity, overweight and central adiposity in Swedish children and adolescents: the European Youth Heart Study. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity 4 (2007), 61--71.
[29]
Karen L. Overall. 2015. The mismeasure of behavior: Identifying tests meaningful to the species studied. Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research 10, 1 (2015), 1--4.
[30]
Jean-loup Rault, Sarah Webber, and Marcus Carter. 2015. Cross - Disciplinary Perspectives on Animal Welfare Science and Animal - Computer Interaction. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technologies.
[31]
Kirsten Schmidt. 2011. Concepts of animal welfare in relation to positions in animal ethics. Acta Biotheoretica 59, 2 (2011), 153--171.
[32]
Peter Singer. 1995. Animal Liberation. Random House.
[33]
Gabriella Tami and Anne Gallagher. 2009. Description of the behaviour of domestic dog (Canis familiaris) by experienced and inexperienced people. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 120, 3-4 (2009), 159--169.
[34]
Heli Väätäjä. 2014. Animal Welfare as a Design Goal in Technology Mediated Human-Animal Interaction. In Proceedings of the 2014 Workshops on Advances in Computer Entertainment Conference - ACE '14 Workshops. 1--8.
[35]
Heli Väätäjä and Emilia Pesonen. 2012. Please, Don't Drive Me Nuts! Experience Goals for Dogs. In Workshop on "How to utilize user experience goals in design?" at NordCHI2012. Copenhagen.
[36]
Heli Väätäjä and Emilia Pesonen. 2013. Ethical issues and guidelines when conducting HCI studies with animals. (2013).
[37]
Edward O Wilson. 1984. Biophilia. Harvard University Press.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Navigating the Paradox: Challenges of Designing Technology for NonhumansProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685363(1-14)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Engaging Dogs with Computer Screens: Animal-Computer InteractionEncyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games10.1007/978-3-031-23161-2_377(653-658)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
  • (2023)Dogs or Not Dogs? Examining ACI Authors' Reporting on Animal Participants' Willingness to Engage in Research: A Spotlight on Mediated and Contingent ConsentProceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction10.1145/3637882.3637888(1-13)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Unleashed enthusiasm: ethical reflections on harms, benefits, and animal-centered aims of ACI

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ACI '16: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction
    November 2016
    116 pages
    ISBN:9781450347587
    DOI:10.1145/2995257
    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 the author(s) 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].

    Sponsors

    • OU: The Open University

    In-Cooperation

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 15 November 2016

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. animal computer interactions
    2. animal ethics
    3. animal welfare
    4. critical anthropomorphism
    5. methodology

    Qualifiers

    • Short-paper

    Conference

    ACI '16
    Sponsor:
    • OU
    ACI '16: Third International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction
    November 15 - 17, 2016
    Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)25
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
    Reflects downloads up to 25 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Navigating the Paradox: Challenges of Designing Technology for NonhumansProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685363(1-14)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Engaging Dogs with Computer Screens: Animal-Computer InteractionEncyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games10.1007/978-3-031-23161-2_377(653-658)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
    • (2023)Dogs or Not Dogs? Examining ACI Authors' Reporting on Animal Participants' Willingness to Engage in Research: A Spotlight on Mediated and Contingent ConsentProceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction10.1145/3637882.3637888(1-13)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
    • (2023)On the Role of Technology in Human–Dog Relationships: A Future of Nightmares or Dreams?IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society10.1109/TTS.2022.32079914:4(352-362)Online publication date: Dec-2023
    • (2023)Systematic iterative design of interactive devices for animalsInteraction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial SystemsInteraction Studies / Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial SystemsInteraction Studies10.1075/is.22045.hir24:2(225-256)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2023
    • (2022)An Ethics Toolkit to Support Animal-Centered Research and DesignFrontiers in Veterinary Science10.3389/fvets.2022.8914939Online publication date: 10-May-2022
    • (2022)Welfare Through Competence: A Framework for Animal-Centric Technology DesignFrontiers in Veterinary Science10.3389/fvets.2022.8859739Online publication date: 30-Jun-2022
    • (2022)Animal Centered Research beyond ACI: Exploring the Applicability of Animal Centered Principles to All Animal ResearchProceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction10.1145/3565995.3566047(1-4)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2022
    • (2022)User Centred design Methods in Animal Centred Design: A systematic review2022 International Conference on Theoretical and Applied Computer Science and Engineering (ICTASCE)10.1109/ICTACSE50438.2022.10009842(84-89)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2022
    • (2022)Bioinclusive Collaborative and Participatory Design: A Conceptual Framework and a Research AgendaDesign and Culture10.1080/17547075.2021.201945514:2(149-183)Online publication date: 20-Jan-2022
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media