A research blog for speculative game design focusing on Animals and Play.
Thwaites, T. (2016) GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human New York: Princeton Architectural Press Goat Man is a design project, and accompanying book by designer Thomas Thwaites. The project gained funding from the Wellcome Trust and uses design as a process to bring the designer closer to another species. The project is broken down into sections in the published book; Soul, Mind, Body, Guts, and Goat Life. As an important piece of speculative design on becoming animal this will be a recurring comparison for the study. I will focus on the chapter discussing the Soul in this post but will…
Austin Stewart’s piece Second Livestock is a speculative design project which presents a new approach to farming for the digital age. The project proposes that battery farming could use immersive technology to increase animal welfare and productivity by immersing chickens in a simulated farm environment, while stacking them high in cylindrical urban farming units. “The aesthetics of the presentation are intentionally poor—mirroring the presentations frequently given at technology conferences and tradeshows. The live demonstration of the enclosure does not involve a chicken, rather a volunteer from the audience straps on a human-scale VR headset and places their hands on a treadmill.…
As part of ongoing research i have been sifting through a large volume of Animal Computer Interaction projects, i will be attempting to write something for the extended Call For Papers for ACE2015 the conference for the Advancement of Computer Entertainment which critiques the focus on utility in a large proportion of ACI. This paper reframes ACI as a form of Speculative or Critical Design Practice which can be used to propose arguments about anthropocentrism. This paper will compare a range of digital games designed for cats designed for phone and tablet devices to analyse what these games, as instances of…
Pig Chase (2013) is a project prototype from a research collaboration between Utrecht School of the Arts, Wageningen University, and Wageningen UR Livestock Research which is designed to investigate inter-species play and how digitally mediated play could open a space for inter-species communication. The project focuses on animal welfare and using games as a means to entertain the livestock and reduce undesired behaviours (such as biting) between the animals as they suffer from boredom while in their pens. The Danish government introduced an amendment to the law governing livestock which required the introduction of a toy (usually a ball on a…
Dodington outlines a practice which has formed from his study as a graduate student at Rice University which has developed into a design practice for “Biological Inclusive Design” which designs with other species rather than for them. This design community is largely architecture based and forms part of the Expanded Environments movement, it tries to collapse the Humanist divide between humans and animals. This work has developed into a book How to Design with the Animal: Lessons in Cross-Species Architeture and Design (2013)