KittyCam

Turning Movements into Meaning

Correlating Behaviors and Movement

Just like humans, animals experience a range of emotions. From feeling happy, relaxed, frustrated or scared, their emotions are usually expressed through body language and behavioral patterns.

Understanding your pet’s emotions is an important part of developing your relationship with your animal. Although they are the better alternative to kids, there is a language barrier that makes it difficult to understand your pet’s wants and needs instantly. However, given time one eventually grows to understand their pet’s needs, but it still might be nice to understand what they might want/need in the moment. This idea lead me to the following design questions:

How might we translate our pet’s movements to understand their needs and desires?

Through sketching and exploring with bodystorming, I was able to explore how gestures can provide meaning to someone. It has allowed me to think about the desirability, usability and feasibility of this idea, analyzing and reflecting on what is possible and how body storming can be used in future iterations.

I also want to mention, to scope this project idea down, I decided to focus on gestures cats do. Animals have different ways of expressing their emotions and may have different body language. I also have cats at home, so I was able to observe their patterns and body language, so those observations were related to a cats experience.

Bodystorming: Prototyping through Gestures

Bodystorming situates brainstorming in a physical experience and tackles on the idea of studying user behavior in their natural environment. “Problem Solving” and brainstorming within a natural environment allows us to empathize and understand how certain movements and gestures are experienced in the space and surrounding environment. It also allows us to reflect and connect with users.

Bodystorming is also unique in the sense that it provides heightened awareness and situations of users — revealing how a physical prototype lacks usability in day to day situations a user might run into in their own environments.

Usually with bodystorming, a prototype is used for users to interact with. Because I was working with cats, and I wanted to explore the concept of of translating movements to meaning — I looked into how gestures in bodystorming could be used for translation. In this case the prototype would be a camera , that records your cat’s movements and turns them in actions or meanings. The movement and translated meaning will then be viewed on a personal device that a the owner can view.

Figure 1: Kitty Cam Bodystorm Concept

Observing Kitty Behavior & Body Language:

Figure 2: Mushu and Oreo “focused” on what is outside

Before going into bodystorming, I began exploring how my cat’s body language relates to certain emotions and actions. I wanted to explore and find patterns to see what certain movements could mean, and hopefully map out certain movements and experiences to emotions, actions and wants.

Figure 3: Observing Cats Behavior and Body Language

Through observations, I was able to generalize movements into certain meanings. I also took note on how the environment and items around them played a role in the kind of movements and potential meanings. For example, if a cat was near their food bowl and looked up at the counter, that most likely would have meant they wanted to eat, so that kind of gesture would represent “feed me”.

Sketching Out the Observations:

Figure 4: Sketched Out Observations

Looking at body movement and the surrounding environment, it was interesting to piece things together and understand how the environment and moment in time can influence a certain gesture.

KittyCam: Capturing Real World Experiences

How it Works:

KittyCam is a camera that can be installed in your living space. It will record your cats movements and translate them into a meaning. These movements will notify owners of what the cats needs are at that moment. The three gestures shown in the video are the following:

1. Play With Me: I found that play with me involved a lot of “paws up movement” — either through standing on their behind legs, or laying on the ground rolled over, most of the times the cats would want to play by gesturing a paws up movement.
2. Feed Me: Location for feed me was key. Both my cats would sit near a counter and move their head up. Knowing that is where their food usually is I was able to infer that gesture meant “feed me”.
3. Eating: While observing I noticed that a tail movement expressed different states of being. When a tail is up and moving up and down, it usually represents some type of happy state. Having a tail be wagged down low seemed to be more specific, and represents eating (the cat could be happy because they were eating).

Reflection:

Bodystorming was a little challenging for me to do. As I went through this process, I realized that I might have done bodystorming differently than how it is supposed to be done. I focused more on gestures, and how gestures can mean something. Although gestures are a part of bodystroming, it usually involves a wearable device being interacted with a user. I did not prototype a wearable for my cats to wear, and it was probably the route I should have done.

Additionally, capturing gestures to interpret can be difficult to generalize. In terms of feasibility, I would have to observe a lot of cats and consult veterinarians to see whether or not most cats move in similar ways to convey emotions/ different needs. Additionally, I would have to understand how this could be implemented technically. What angles will the camera be recording at, how does it know where the cat is (this is where I should have made a wearable) ? The more I reflect on this the more I realize and understand problems that could arise. KittyCam might not capture everything, so it defeats the purpose of understanding what your pet wants in the moment.

In terms of desirability, KittyCam could be useful, if implemented correctly. Pet cams already exist, but I don’t believe that any of them translate movements into meaning. As pet owners, it might be nice to understand your cats needs and wants via a pet cam, but again, this would have to be implemented correctly, which may not be feasible.

In terms of usability, KittyCam would act like a regular camera — at least that was the idea behind it. As mentioned before, I should have incorporated some type of wearable that will make the KittyCam more accurate.

Overall, I need to revisit bodystorming as a prototyping method. I should have asked for clarification earlier, and that was my fault. I did not realize I approached bodystorming wrong until I finished my process. I am glad I was able to recognize this and hopefully learn from this going forward.