Calling our world “human-centric” might actually be a misnomer because it’s almost always adult-human-centric. It’s filled with arbitrary rules created by adults, for adults, but applied to everyone, including children and animals.

I am convinced that the years I have spent working with dogs and trying to understand their experiences have better prepared me to understand my non-verbal newborn son.

NaaS is a thoughtful and reflective approach that, when assigning user or stakeholder status to nature, builds on its systemic nature to account for its complexity through the consideration of second, third, and fourth-order effects that go beyond linear thinking (common in the 1 and 0’s of the business world) and combine it with systems thinking (common in the design world).

We love our animal companions. We name them, dress them, feed them, take them to the doctor, and some of us even leave our inheritance to them. But do we really understand them?

Jakob von Uexküll’s Time Perception and it’s role in Animal Centered Design

‘It is nought good a slepyng hound to wake’ wrote Chaucer in the 1300s.

Sleep startle is certainly not a new thing; however, with the increase in the number of dogs now living as family members, it is something we are more aware of. You may also hear sleep startle called sleep aggression. I prefer a startle as our dogs are not being purposefully aggressive when they are suddenly woken. It is a defensive action.

Three applications of animal centered design are:

1) a design discipline

2) a DEI practice strategy

3) a bridge between urban humans and nature

During the process of designing for and with animals there is always an inherent tension between our humanness, and the use of our human cognitive abilities to understand the experience of animals.

Designing for and with animals requires a heightened degree of ethical sensitivity, which due to the complexity of working with other species, will be inevitably challenged throughout the design process. The Ethics Toolkit for Animal Centered Design helps help guide an ethically reflective, species inclusive approach to designing for and with animals.