“Hey, where’s my hay?” design fictions in horse-computer interaction

Abstract

Horses (and other nonhuman animals) are increasingly encountering systems designed by human animals. Some of these systems are conceived with altruistic motives to enrich horses’ lives. Other systems are designed to facilitate human interaction, with little consideration for the animals forced to share the human environment. As with cognitively challenged humans, horses are ‘unaware’ and often ‘implicit’ interactors. This category of user is uniquely vulnerable to the projected requirements and needs of designers. To think like a horse (or any user without a voice) a designer must be able to embrace ‘the otherness’ of an unfamiliar perspective. This paper uses four examples of ‘design fiction’ to speculate about systems that might actually be meaningful to a horse. The intention is not to seriously propose these as prototypes. Rather, they are thought experiments, illustrating the inherent danger in trying to co-design with the voiceless.