Species-Appropriate Computer Mediated Interaction
| Submitted by | Robert McGrath |
| Affiliation | NCSA |
| All authors | McGrath, R. E. |
| Keywords | Species-appropriate interfaces, Computer-non-human interfaces, cross-species interaction |
| Paper link |
Download |
| Submitted | 2009-01-04 14:10 |
| Submission history |
Abstract
Given the importance of our non-human companions,
do we not want to extend social media to our nonhuman
co-species? If “human computer interfaces”
should be designed for “Anyone. Anywhere.” (the
theme of CHI 2001), then why not for all species?
Recent pioneering efforts have shown that computer
mediated interactions between humans and dogs, cats,
chickens, cows, hamsters, and other species are
technically possible. These efforts excite the
imagination and challenge our understanding the basic
nature of computer mediated interaction.
do we not want to extend social media to our nonhuman
co-species? If “human computer interfaces”
should be designed for “Anyone. Anywhere.” (the
theme of CHI 2001), then why not for all species?
Recent pioneering efforts have shown that computer
mediated interactions between humans and dogs, cats,
chickens, cows, hamsters, and other species are
technically possible. These efforts excite the
imagination and challenge our understanding the basic
nature of computer mediated interaction.
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Summary:
Timely choice of topic. Need more original definitions, synthesis, or new insights. In detail: With Roomba highlighting its ability to get along with pets as a product feature and many YouTube videos showing pets reacting to DIY robots, this could have been a very useful and insightful paper on a timely choice of topic. I would like to see more rigor in reasoning and presentation. It feels like I just read a list of previous research with little insight or synthesis. I expected to see critical questions, a definition of "appropriateness," and attempts at synthesizing or criticizing existing research in an interesting way. Here is the main question I didn't get answered: How do you define species-appropriateness? And therefore... what makes Poultry Internet's multi-modal interfaces "species-appropriate?" Why is haptic appropriate for both humans and chickens? Instead of listing existing research projects, I wish it had compared them in a critical way and mapped them out using visual means. It would have made the paper more useful and constructive to see a table of modality vs. species in existing research and their appropriateness. In addition to the rather un-structured list of potential research challenges, I would like to see an attempt at answering them or forming a framework or a set of criteria that can be used to answer them. Examples of questions this paper could have partially answered: Is the concept of "user" even valid in the case of computer-mediated human-pet interaction? How is this similar to or different from designing for babies where there is a mediary user (pet owner and parents) and the end user (pets and babies)? For better readability: More professionalism in the writing and notation will improve the paper. Inconsistent notation of references and frequent use of parentheses get in the way of reading and comprehending the point the paragraph is trying to make; would be helpful to do more content chunking by using subheadings to group related paragraphs in the "Pioneering Work" section. For exmaple: Human-pet monitoring system, Wearables and haptic interfaces, etc. Overall, a great topic fot alt.chi, but I'd need to get more out of it than a list of existing research and open-ended questions. But again, I'd be happy to see another reviewer giving this a good score and articulating what they got out of it. |
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I have to agree with the first reviewer; in short, this is a good review of the field of non-human HCI. In particular, I worry that it doesn't seem to say anything that hasn't already been said by papers like the human-poultry interaction work.
Furthermore, it misses (to its intellectual detriment) work from outside HCI on the same topic which I think would provide a theoretical underpinning that would greatly improve this paper and start to answer the questions of Why? and What for? that I think are at the core of the problems I had with this paper. I understand the reticence to go and explore the full variety of animal-human interactions from animal husbandry and dog training to Temple Grandin and slaughterhouse design, but the questions that the author starts to raise seem very similar to those explore in more detail by people like Donna Haraway in her "Companion Species Manifesto" and (I believe, although I haven't read it) "When Species Meet". It's tricky, because the topic matter is clearly very alt.chi. But the discussion doesn't go beyond the questions that already been made by previous work, doesn't answer those questions and doesn't take us any further into the discussion. I would really like to see the author engage with CHI as a field in this work, and use this domain to not just question what it is we should be doing but also push further beyond our existing comfort zones. |
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This paper presents a survey of previous work in animal-computer interactions. I was somewhat disappointed at the lack of novel work being presented, but what the authors do contribute is some interesting arguments about what we can learn from the cited body of previous work and apply to our general thinking's about HCI.
As a survey paper I would have liked to see a better organization of the prior art, with some sort of categorization scheme/taxonomy, to capture the overall field and inspire future work. Overall, I think this paper successfully brings to light active work in the area, and would be interesting to the alt.chi audience. |
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The author examines computer interfaces for nonhuman co-species. The paper clearly describes definition and problems of "species-appropriate" computer interface. However, as previous reviewers also described, there are a few related works that were not cited that affect the author's argument.
Uexkül (1934) described that each species has own perceptual world. He argued that even if they faced a same representation, they had a different experience of it (e.g. dogs are almost blind for colors). tEnt proposed a work "Call <-> Response" (2008) for computers and birds. In this work, they try to make a peculiar kind of “conversation” beyond human language takes place, with both computers and birds affecting each other’s behavior. I encourage to the author to investigate previous work not only from human centric point of view (i.e. pet, livestock), but also more species-specific point of view. Overall, this is an interesting paper and well fits to the focus of alt.chi. |
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The author summarized the trend, the movement of "Computer-non-human interfaces" and verbalized the link among the researches. The paper also described the definition of "species-appropriate". I think the author is able to discuss the meaning of the definition from his subjective viewpoint and it help the author' creativity in the future.
[Ricklefs & Schluter. 1993] noted that the essence of ecology is the study of interactions among species in the communities . The interaction is "species-appropriate" interaction because it is the basis of ecosystem. without "species-appropriate" interaction within the ecosystem, it would not able to sustain. |
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I thank the reviewers for their thoughtful comments.
Many of the criticisms are too broad or deep for me to address today. This topic seems timely and likely to spark discussion, but I have not seen a good summary of previous work, nor a discussion from the point of view of CHI. As a matter of fact, most of my colleagues had never even heard of this work. This paper is a review, and an attempt to open the discussion, not to solve the problems. (This is 'alt.chi', after all.) So the question for the program committee is whether this paper is a good enough representation of the topic to merit the attention of the audience. |
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I add my review as a comment, because the system closed a bit earlier than I expected, by my west-coast clock.
Quality - 5 - it's well written and easy to read, but the contribution is fairly lightweight, as it is mostly a light survey of technologies for human-animal interactions. Appropriate for alt.chi - 4 - it's definitely altrenative, but i'm not sure there's enough meat on the bones to make for a good meal. Discussion - 6 - This is a strange enough topic that people will invariably have things to say about it. Review: This paper argues that people should more seriously consider designing HCI for other species, as asymmetrical interactions between people and other animals. The author points to a number of technologies developed to do just this, but glosses over any interaction design contributions that these examples may have made. This paper generally reads like the author wants to air a crazy idea, but the paper lacks depth of analysis or any real good ideas how to get somewhere interesting in this arena. The author rightly points out that certain current approaches to hci will not work for this 'user' group. Yes. The same has been argued of designing for young children. What i would like to see in a future version of this paper is constructive advice about how to go about this new field. i.e. what are the design guidelines? What methodologies can be adapted to this new field? What examples can we learn from, drawn from either existing or ongoing research? |
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