Dog-to-dog technology-mediated interactions [new study]

Dr Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Aalto University, Espoo, Finland, and specializes (amongst other things) “in building animal-driven technologies to explore what it means to interact as an animal (a non-human one) and how as system designers we can support this interaction.” She points out that :

“As a 2018 PDSA PAW report (a study of animals in the UK) suggests, out of 8.9 million dogs in the UK, 2.1 million were left alone in their owner’s home for quite considerable lengths of time. This is not always progressive towards a dog’s social welfare, which without being able to socialize may be inclined towards more negative and problem behaviors.”

Perhaps if they (i.e. dogs) could contact each other via the internet, their situation might improve? If so, what might dog-to-dog technology-mediated interactions actually look like?

Such things are explored in a paper for the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK.

See: On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog… Unless You’re Another Dog.

Research research by Martin Gardiner