On the Role of Technology in Human–Dog Relationships: A Future of Nightmares or Dreams?

Abstract

Digital technologies that help people take care of their dogs are becoming more widespread. Yet, little research explores what the role of technology in the human-dog relationship should be. We conducted a qualitative study incorporating quantitative and thematic analysis of 155 UK dog owners reflecting on their daily routines and technology's role in it,disentangling the what-where-why of interspecies routines and activities, technological desires, and rationales for technological support across common human-dog activities. We found that increasingly entangled daily routines lead to close multi-species households where dog owners conceptualize technology as having a role to support them in giving care to their dogs. When confronted with the role of technology across various activities, only chores like cleaning up after their dogs lead to largely positive considerations, while activities that benefit themselves like walking together lead to largely negative considerations. For other activities, whether playing, training, or feeding, attitudes remain diverse. In general, across all activities both a nightmare scenario of technology taking the human's role and in doing so disentangling the human-dog bond, as well as a dream scenario of technology augmenting human abilities arise. We argue that the current trajectory of digital technology for pets is increasingly focused on enabling remote interactions, an example of the nightmare scenario in our thematic analysis. It is important to redirect this trajectory to one of technology predominantly supporting us in becoming better and more informed caregivers.

Designing for Trust: Autonomous Animal - Centric Robotic & AI Systems

“…In parallel, industry is developing the next generation of autonomous systems to look after humans in the home -most notably robot arms that might assist with all manner of domestic tasks relating to multispecies interaction. Van De Linden et al [10] note that, "increasingly entangled daily routines lead to close multi-species households where dog owners conceptualize technology as having a role to support them in giving care to their dogs", it is the notion of entanglement and in particular multi-species entanglement that leads us to reflect upon the design of systems in such contexts and to push beyond human-centered approaches, and to coin a phrase think about multispecies-centered approaches to design. It is also worth noting that other research has examined the ways in which technologies such as social agents are interacted with by "dog-owners and dogs" [8], while other research has taken a multi-species-centered approach to understand the impact of social robots in the household [9].…”