Hi my name’s Fiona French and I work in the School of Computing and Digital Media
at London Metropolitan University.
My co-authors are Clara Mancini and Helen Sharp, from the Faculty of Science, Technology,
Engineering and Maths at The Open University in the UK.
The goal of our research has been to design and develop some novel technology-enabled
enrichment for captive elephants
- why? -
because elephants are social and smart and usually live in large herds, exploring their
environment and communicating with each continuously.
As we know, things can be a bit different in a captive situation, where strict routines
are inevitable; space and social opportunities may be limited.
So we’ve been trying to design some interactive devices that elephants can use to control
features of their environment, providing them with both cognitive and sensory stimulation.
How to go about developing a system that would engage an elephant?
As well as experiencing the world at a different scale from humans, elephants rely on different
senses and have different physical capabilities and psychological motivations.
We took a research through Design and Craft approach - handbuilding multiple versions
of enrichment devices and testing them with elephants over several years…
This is our main tester, Valli, who lives at Skanda Vale Ashram in Wales.
As we progressed, we became increasingly aware of how the aesthetic dimensions of each device
affected how the elephant interacted and whether she was interested in playing with it
- and how her aesthetic sensibilities differed from our own.
We know that an elephant trunk can be compared with a human hand, in that it is used for
caressing and combat, feeding oneself and others, investigating novel objects and manipulating
tools.
But it’s also simultaneously a sensory organ - a nose and a sound producer.
Elephants’ olfactory and auditory senses are very sensitive.
We considered trying to design aroma into our enrichment but everything we made was
smelly enough anyway - smells we could neither perceive nor regulate.
And we deliberately chose to avoid food associations so we could tell if the devices had intrinsic
appeal, rather than being related to foraging behaviour or fitness.
It seemed to be important that devices were visible, so that elephants could notice them
as new objects in their environment.
However, one of our testers, Lakshmi, is blind, yet once she had first discovered a new toy,
she would return to it again and again.
Since elephants more often use smells and sounds to navigate their world, we weren’t
too concerned with visual aesthetics.
As output, we did a lot of experimentation with sound synthesis as well as using short
samples of instruments and other animals.
We were very conscious that playing human music to an animal has limited chance of success
as an enriching activity - for many reasons -
Now, our early prototypes were essentially switches - different versions of binary on/off
controls.
The elephants seemed to enjoy feeling the wooden frames, touching all around the edges
and stroking the different materials we used, and probably smelling them too.
But everything was static - the buttons had to be robust and bolted securely to fixtures.
Push buttons weren’t pushed, so hidden sensors were used to capture all trunk tip interactions.
However, we felt this was covert and actually went against our principles of giving more
control to the elephants.
In addition, it probably meant that mapping input to output wasn’t immediately apparent
for the animal.
In order to allow the elephant to express acoustic preference, we needed to create an
analogue control - something that could provide a graduated response.
And we wanted to make this control pleasurable to use as well as easy to understand
- the aesthetics and the affordance had to work together.
We based the design on a slider.
Sliders have obvious boundaries that are both visual and tactile as well as a thumb or handle
that protrudes, tempting the user to touch it.
Even a light touch will move the thumb along the track.
We hypothesised that a slider would solicit action and facilitate the learning of itself.
We made one by repurposing an old drawer slider and mounting it in a wooden frame.
We used infrasonic sensors embedded in the frame to track the slider position, and used
an old scrubbing brush for the thumb, chosen for its texture and smell.
The slider movement was mapped to both volume and tone of the auditory output, which we
synthesised.
When we first installed the device, neither elephant - Valli or Lakshmi - showed much
interest, but video footage revealed that later that evening, when everyone had left,
they both played with the slider.
And they continued to interact with it after I had left, after the audio component had
been disabled.
We traditionally think of having 5 senses, and perhaps a sixth “intuitive” sense,
but recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in the kind of pleasure that is experienced
from physically doing something - a kinaesthetic or performative embodied sensory experience.
We find this to be particularly relevant in a more-than-human context, since we assume
that most other animals experience life in a holistic fashion, not separating signals
into scents, sounds, bumps, glimpses and flavours.
Indeed, performative and tactile aesthetics are very important qualities for a device
aimed at elephants.
A device that affords a pleasurable experience is much more likely to meet its enrichment
goals, since the design will encourage the animal to play with it.
More fundamentally, our exploration has enabled us to develop aesthetic sensibilities that
a human-centred perspective might fail to appreciate but which more-than-human centred
design demands.
We would like to thank all the elephants who tested our devices and all the keepers, carers
and experts who gave their support and evaluation and encouragement throughout this project.