Stray dogs/cats

User Research and Product Definition

Duration：7 weeks

产品2302（A504）

Support organizations：无锡流浪动物基地

Coordinator：朱令仪

Aims:

-to unpack mutuality as it manifests in interactions between human and nonhuman stakeholders

-to imaginatively “explore a radically better future without attempting to define it”

Schedule:

W1-2: Lecture1 (UR)

W3-4: Field research

Stakeholders: the bases in Wuxi, pet café, pet owners, pet shops, pet care, pet hospitals, pet market, volunteers...

Data collection: field notes, photos, audio recordings, and artifact collections that included flyers, catalogues, and booklets, community-building activities and events, to learn how activities and interaction unfolds in the base and how interface with others outside the base.

Data analysis: explication de texte. Seeking to find “fragments” or “glimmers” of that world worth pursuing—even if those fragments were partial, flawed, or incomplete.

W5-6: Lecture2 (PD), Design strategy

W7: Output:

Design for Coexistence：animal identity, base planning, service, operation, ecosystems……

Rerference:

Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S., & Light, A. (2021, May). Wanting to live here: Design after anthropocentric functionalism. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-24).

coexistenceconsortium.com

Symbiotic methods: more-than-human companions for knowing

Despite aspiring otherwise, too often more-than-human research superficially engages with other organisms and treats them as subordinate to social theorising. We are influenced by scholars who remain curious and in touch with the lives of their nonhuman companions, and the socio-ecological worlds they dwell in. Other beings are more than merely good to think with - their biological, relational, fleshy and creative capacities can carry and augment our thoughts. A scholarly indebtedness and ethical obligation that requires we seriously acknowledge how their lives and deaths compose our conceptual activities.

... explore how our other-than-human intellectual partners inspire us towards other-worldly methods. Their unique modes of breathing, eating, sensing and connecting offer instruction for knowing, and open challenging conversations about how we conduct research. By following and corresponding with the bodies and behaviours of other beings we can generate new questions, processes, and techniques. For example, what can moles teach us about digging and accommodating to fuzziness (Parreñas 2023), or fungi and bacteria about collaboration (Tsing 2015; Benezra 2023)? How do eels help us understand transformations (Kaishian 2022), or how are plants entangled in knowledge-making (Kimmerer 2003, 2013)? And what do porcine tastes tell us about the omnivorous intellectual consumption of scholars?

... to propose novel ways of doing research beyond routine academic paradigms. ...for thought-provoking insights into living organisms, ones that think through the ethical, political and epistemological possibilities of research. How can a symbiotic, methodological conversation generate new reflections on our more-than-human companions and what they do to our ways of knowing?

More-than human research and innovation

Interspecies agencies: controversies, ontologies and new forms of cohabitation