Our project "Supporting stray animal caregivers on Koç University campus" and my PhD research topic include many similarities in roots. Especially in the user research process, I have reached out and learned about information that can also help my PhD research. Therefore, in my case, this project was not only a submission that I had to do for my academic career but also a four-year-long PhD research topic.
To briefly cover what I currently study, my research question is, "what are the methods used to research and design for and with nonhuman animals equally (in my case, stray animals)? Drawing from the diverse literature that includes animals with an equity-oriented perspective, the approach we used throughout the research and design process remained relatively human-centric. Although we stated that this project targets the human caregivers primarily rather than stray animals, we failed to include animals in some ways. As the jury says today, maybe we would have tested the tangible product with campus animals in order to understand how they react. Or we would have done desk research if there were results from prior research with similar purposes. More importantly, we would have had an intention to include campus animals in that project more equally. As Aspling et al. (2018) said, "Instead of avoiding or taking an agnostic approach of such enquires, we should at least aim towards an open-minded -and equally skeptical- attitude to what they might be experiencing." Studying with animals brings challenges with themselves due to the different communication techniques. However, I believe that taking a step toward nonhuman animals is an essential attempt, especially in this highly human-centred urban life. Witnessing these issues in the form of student projects, municipality initiatives, workshops organized by NGOs, and activist events is so exciting from a research point of view. For this reason, we need to continue to search for better methods to study with animals.
Image 1: https://www.wikihow.com/Criticize-Constructively
References:
Fredrik Aspling, Oskar Juhlin, and Heli Väätäjä. 2018. Understanding animals: a critical challenge in ACI. In <i>Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction</i> (<i>NordiCHI '18</i>). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 148–160. https://doi.org/10.1145/3240167.3240226
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