Lunds Civila Ryttarforening, LCR, is one of Sweden’s largest equestrian clubs with its facilities located in between Norra Faladen to the north and LTH to the south. To the west of the horse facilities is “Smorlyckans Idrottsplats” with football pitches, tennis courts, a Jujutsu club and a Home Guard’s building. The club has approximately 500 weekly riders and offers a wide range of activities within the the riding school, as well as stalls for private horses. Discussions on whether the equestrian centre should be relocated or not have reached a standstill as it has been going on for about 50 years. I believe that if LCR is to stay on its current site it can not continue to be an island. Therefore this project is an investigation into how the centre could be developed meeting and integrating with its surroundings. As much as the horse is the centre of the stable and the equestrian sport it’s also the centre of this project. “When Species Meet” is a what-if scenario on what could happen if we plan for the horse and who else that could benefit from that. In addition to the architectural proposal, one major question with the project has been to develop my own method and investigate how it’s possible to keep a high rate of complexity when working with a project. This is something I have done by taking the position of the horse instead of the architect. This change of position has provided me with a possibility to see the site, with all its opportunities, from a perspective that I couldn’t have without the horse. Therefore, this project is also a try on how it could be possible to take on other projects by relocating my investigation to several other positions relevant for those projects. (Less)

When Species Meet

Introduction. LEARNING THROUGH INTERACTIVE MEDIA. 1. The Multimedia Learning Revolution. 2. Resources and Tools for Learning. 3. Simulation and Vicarious Experience. 4. Structured Learning. CONCEPTUAL DESIGN: 5. Strategic Approaches to Educational Multimedia Design. 6. Context and Multimedia Design. 7. Design Action Potential. PRESENTATION DESIGN: 9. The Multimedia Toolset. 10. Text and Graphics. 11. Animation. 12. Sound.

Design for multimedia learning

The term ‘life course epidemiology’ was coined in 1997 with the publication of the first edition of A Life Course Approach to Chronic Disease Epidemiology.1 This book reviewed the pre-adult risk factors for cardiometabolic and respiratory disease, the catalyst being the imaginative research on the fetal origins of adult disease being driven forward at that time by Professor David Barker. We defined life course epidemiology as ‘the study of long-term biological, behavioural and psychosocial processes that link adult health and disease risk to physical or social exposures acting during gestation, childhood, adolescence, earlier in adult life or across generations’.1 Although our definition of life course epidemiology has stood the test of time, the field has evolved and there have been conceptual developments, methodological innovations which facilitate efforts to test these concepts, and an increasing corpus of empirical research demonstrating how factors from earlier life are associated with later life health and disease, as well as the pathways and biological mechanisms that may be involved. These developments have generated further ideas and challenges to life course models in an iterative process. As the theme of this special issue suggests, one important development has been the gradual shift of research focus from clinical disease endpoints to multi-faceted traits and longitudinal trajectories of functional phenotypes that can be assessed well before any clinical threshold is reached. This has naturally led on to the application of a life course epidemiological approach to ageing. The purpose of this overview is therefore to assess the development and current state of the field of life course epidemiology, including its recent application to the study of ageing as the focus of this special issue.

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The last two decades of life course epidemiology, and its relevance for research on ageing.

Academic and scientific literature continues to explode at an unprecedented rate. A student entering any scientific field must initially navigate a massive resource of information. The logarithmic growth of the current scientific knowledge base has created a significant knowledge transfer market niche between the excessive specificity of the peer-reviewed journal article and the broad, generally considered to be true, knowledge captured by the student textbook. Reflecting a growing obsolescence of the traditional hardcover textbook, I would suggest that there is an apparent need and an increasing market for the “paperback textbook” one of which is the subject of this review.

David Fraser is a Canadian pioneer of animal welfare science. He has published widely on animal welfare research, its practical applications, and its philosophical basis. He is currently Professor and NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Animal Welfare at the University of British Columbia, and serves as an advisor to many international organizations including representing Canada at the Office international des epizooties, in development of international standards for farm animal welfare. His recent book, Understanding Animal Welfare: The Science in its Cultural Context is the 4th of the current 5, in the Animal Welfare Book Series, which is produced in collaboration between UFAW (The Universities Federation for Animal Welfare), and Wiley-Blackwell. Another book and author in this series, recognizable to many readers, is Animal Welfare: Limping Towards Eden, by John Webster, 2005. This series would fall into the genre of the paperback textbook. I believe the market for this genre is the academic consumer (instructors, students, and curriculum designers), the applied professional and the rare especially interested and intelligent citizen.

If we adopt the premise that all knowledge is temporary and recently constructed, then the criteria to judge a paperback textbook would include the cutting-edge quality of the information, quality of writing, and utility in transitioning the relatively ignorant but interested student to a more informed and engaged academic or researcher. It should be noted that this book has a single author in a genre that usually is constructed by a compilation of experts with a senior editor. This single author organization provides both strengths such as excellent coherence and weaknesses to the final product. A primary challenge in the book is the title and the effort to link widely divergent schools of study, the life experience of the animal(s) under question, the social and cultural matrix that placed the animal in its environment and the resultant types of animal welfare questions being asked.

From a historic review of the development of the speciality of animal welfare research, the book is very well organized and delivered. The historical philosophical deliberation on what is an animal and the ethical evolution of what moral consideration animals are due is well documented. The cognitive evolution of animal welfare science is supplemented by specific examples that illustrate various scientific methods of evaluating the experiences of animals. The book is divided into 3 sections: “animal welfare in context,” provides a philosophical background of animal use and the human-animal cultural evolution; section 2 “studying animal welfare” is an excellent review of the history, ideologies and methodologies of the major schools of current animal welfare research.

In Section 3, “drawing conclusions about animal welfare” on the other hand, the author deals primarily with 2 separate and significantly different concepts. Chapters 11 and 12 essentially deal with the evaluation of the various schools of animal welfare science and how can animal welfare scientists best communicate new knowledge to society to effectively result in better animal welfare. The final 2 chapters bravely attempt to deal with, or at least identify, the serious epistemological problems in the field of animal welfare science. The problem that well meaning and informed people genuinely disagree on central issues of animal welfare and use, as any individual will believe some sources of knowledge are more legitimate or valuable than other sources of knowledge. This question is fairly well handled, despite the inherent resistance to be solved.

There are some topics absent from discussion in this book, especially if your reader expectations lean toward an interest in the “Cultural Context” commitment in the books title. Cultural context is somewhat ambiguous as it may refer to the culture of scientific investigation or the greater culture of an evolving society. The book adequately discusses the culture of scientific investigation. There is limited recognition of cultural environments other than the dominant Anglo-American and European society where the science of animal welfare has evolved. This may be expected as the current science of animal welfare is limited to the dominant culture of the highly developed world. Promulgation of laws, the most visible evidence of cultural change, is only briefly touched upon; however, there is a discussion of how scientists can best inform this discourse.

As a primer for veterinary or animal science students interested in pursing further studies in animal welfare, it is an excellent resource. A close reading will result in the veterinary audience reconsidering the application of veterinary medicine versus veterinary science in informing daily decisions. Dr. Fraser has published so widely in his long career that individuals with an intermediate knowledge of the animal welfare literature will be familiar with much of the information presented in this book. However, as an introductory reader for the undergraduate or the professional returning to academia it provides an excellent synthesis of the science and current epistemology of the questions around our concern for non-human animal welfare.

Understanding Animal Welfare: The Science in its Cultural Context

In this paper I conceptualize experiences with technology as an object of study for educational technology research and propose phenomenology as a highly suitable method for studying this construct. I begin by reviewing existing research focusing on the construct of experiences with technology and the approaches utilized for its study. To augment this literature, I explain the phenomenological concept of experience and describe its utility for understanding experiences with technology. I propose the theoretical and methodological approach of phenomenology as a framework for developing a research agenda on experiences with technology and for unifying existing lines of research in this area. To illustrate the promise of this approach and to facilitate its application, I describe a research design consistent with the theoretical underpinnings of phenomenology, including methods for collecting and analyzing data as well as ethical and validity considerations specific to this research design. I conclude by identifying several possible research directions utilizing a phenomenological approach in educational technology to incite further research in this area.

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A phenomenological approach to experiences with technology: current state, promise, and future directions for research

This research is investigating the potential for designing digital toys and games as playful cognitive enrichment activities for captive elephants. The new field of Animal Computer Interaction is exploring a range of approaches to the problem of designing user-centred systems for animals and this investigation into devices for elephants aims to directly contribute towards a methodological approach for designing smart and playful enrichment for all species.

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Designing Interactive Toys for Elephants

This paper explores Research through Design (RtD) as a potential methodology for developing new interactive experiences for animals. We present an example study from an on-going project and examine whether RtD offers an appropriate framework for developing knowledge in the context of Animal-Computer Interaction, as well as considering how best to document such work. We discuss the design journey we undertook to develop interactive systems for captive elephants and the extent to which RtD has enabled us to explore concept development and documentation of research. As a result of our explorations, we propose that particular aspects of RtD can help ACI researchers gain fresh perspectives on the design of technology-enabled devices for non-human animals. We argue that these methods of working can support the investigation of particular and complex situations where no idiomatic interactions yet exist, where collaborative practice is desirable and where the designed objects themselves offer a conceptual window for future research and development.

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Exploring Research through Design in Animal Computer Interaction

High tech cognitive and acoustic enrichment for captive elephants.

Species-specific aesthetics is an important consideration for interaction designers working with animals. The paper explores the concept of species-specific aesthetics with particular reference to elephants. Applying existing aesthetic dimensions and design principles to the challenge of designing interactive enrichment for them, we show how the insights gained can inform more than human-centered design in different settings. We offer a multi-faceted, multi-sensory lens for examining an animal-centred aesthetic experience of technology.

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More Than Human Aesthetics: Interactive Enrichment for Elephants

The Life Project explores issues of psychological projection into technology by diving into the convoluted relationship between practical purpose and emotional attachment, through both the creative act of designing and making robot entities with artificial emotions, and the social act of engaging with them. This process explores the concept of body representation through a multiidentity in virtual and physical blended space. In a lesser sense, it also suggests a future world of collaboration between physical and virtual forms, enabled by new forms of representation in blended worlds.

Fiona French

Papers

Designing Interactive Toys for Elephants

Exploring Research through Design in Animal Computer Interaction

High tech cognitive and acoustic enrichment for captive elephants.

More Than Human Aesthetics: Interactive Enrichment for Elephants

The life project