Developing the framework

Rationale

In chapter 2, we reviewed the biotelemetry literature to appraise the extent of the impacts caused by body-attached tags and to look at current approaches to address the problem. We understood that the issue is a substantial concern for biotelemetrists and that the guidelines so far available to reduce impacts are not effective, as they make it difficult to render a systematic design that accounts for the many biological and technological variables at stake. This raised the question of how to systematically design wearables that impinge less and pointed to the concept of wearability as the key design goal to achieve. We proceeded by drawing a parallel between biotelemetrists’ guidelines (Kenward 2000; Murray and Fuller 2000; Morton et al. 2003; Hawkins 2004; Wilson and McMahon 2006; Casper 2009; Walker et al. 2012), which focus on animal wearers’ needs, and the User-Centred Design (UCD) central value of conforming a design to users’ needs (Gould and Lewis 1985). Specifically, biotelemetrists advocate for body-attached tags to be more consistent with animal wearers’ physicality, behaviours, and lifestyles to reduce adverse effects - and implicitly, improve their experience as wearers; likewise, UCD champions focus on users’ capabilities, needs, and tasks to deliver a positive User Experience (UX) with the technology. Such concurrence prompted us to propose that systematically designing for wearability may help to deliver wearables that impinge less, much in the same way as systematically designing for usability helps delivering products positively experienced by users (Mao et al. 2005). Since UCD provides conceptual frameworks that support the systematic design of good UX, we made reference to these to develop our WCF and, thus, to achieve an equivalent systematisation of design for a good WX. Specifically, we initially

based our WCF on the model espoused by Preece et al. (2005, pp. 19-30), who promote the use of conceptual tools such as design principles, usability goals, and user experience goals to help designers to design for good UX. The authors refer to these as “concrete means” that “orient designers towards thinking about different aspects of their designs” (p. 25). We took inspiration from such UCD key drivers and reoriented them as criteria and abstractions for WX design for animals, since we aimed at providing designers with an equivalent set of concrete, orienting items to think systematically about an animal wearer experience. The next section presents the approach taken to gather information and derive the set of principles, values, and operational items that constitute the elements of the WCF, therefore achieving the first research objective articulated in section 1.2; the structure and components of our framework are described later in section 4.2.

Approach

The components of the WCF were deduced from pertinent text excerpts, passages and quotations from reviewed literature, which related to device-induced impacts, tag features associated with negative effects, design guidelines proposed to minimise these effects, as well as animals’ needs, characteristics, activities and environments; this raw material was selected from representative papers, manuals, and technical reports of the biotelemetry literature; these were reviewed in sections 2.2 and 2.3 of this dissertation (Kenward 2000; Murray and Fuller 2000; Morton et al. 2003; Hawkins 2004; Wilson and McMahon 2006; Casper 2009; Walker et al. 2012). This information gathering followed a Document Analysis approach by which text within documents (see section 3.4.1 for our interpretation of what counts as a document) is examined and interpreted iteratively to identify patterns pertinent to the topic and organise them into categories (Bowen 2009). To systematise the process of text interpretation, we conducted a thematic-like analysis that involved sorting selected excerpts into both predefined and ‘emerging-while-reading’ conceptual containers. This abductive procedure, by which information expressing similar concepts is inserted into expected categories (deductive stage) or is used to generate new categories (inductive stage), produced consistent patterns that were used to derive the concepts and elements of the WCF.

Process

Biotelemetry papers, manuals, and technical reports were initially identified by searching on Google Scholar for critical articles on the use of the biotelemetry technique by means of the keywords: ‘biotelemetry’ and ‘impact’. Casper (2009) was the first relevant item identified from which a snowball-like procedure for searching other similar publications was performed. Snowballing is a systematic literature review technique which uses the bibliography of an initial set of papers and scans it forward and backward to find other relevant papers to a point of saturation (Wohlin 2014); that is, when no new papers are found. However, in this research the procedure was mildly applied since the intention was

that of understanding the extent of impact derived by poor design, and current ways of addressing it, rather than covering every aspect of biotelemetry impact by performing a systematic literature review. Thus, differently from what is recommended for the conventional procedure by Wohlin (2014), the starting set consisted of a few papers and the search was stopped when we saw that the critical articles were recurrently cited within the general biotelemetry literature. In this way, seven scientific publications (reviewed in chapter 2) were found and their texts analysed. They were specifically:

§ Chapter 2 of the book Research Technique in Animal Ecology, critically reviewing the effects of marking animals with electronic tags (Murray and Fuller 2000);

§ One technical manual in Animal Biotelemetry illustrating use, implementation, advantages and drawbacks of the technique (Kenward 2000);

§ One technical report in Animal Welfare describing device-induced impacts and proposing guidelines and recommendations (Morton et al. 2003);

§ One critical paper from two major authors in Animal Biotelemetry expounding drawbacks and limitations of the practice (Wilson and McMahon 2006);

§ One critical paper in the use of animal biotelemetry by an Animal Welfare author (Walker et al. 2012);

§ Two major reviews by Animal Welfarists, describing impacts, reviewing tag design aspects, and proposing design recommendations (Hawkins 2004 and Casper 2009). We started the selection process by looking for information related to perception, obstruction, and acceptance of a tag from an animal’s perspective, deriving these concepts from the guidelines reviewed in chapter 2. We also deductively selected all the animals’ characteristics, activities, and environments found in the text in order to account for the principle of having a focus on interactors. In other words, excerpts of the seven publications’ texts related to tag wearability (e.g. device impacts, animal traits19_{, recommendations for}

improving the design, etc.) were selected and sorted into one or more of these pre-defined containers (i.e. perception, obstruction, acceptance, characteristics, activities, environments). At the same time, while reading the documents, the texts provided other appropriate information about, for example, devices’ features, components and attachments relevant for describing WX, or other animals who, interacting with the wearer, produce an experience. Inductively, we created, and added to the scheme, categories representing these excerpts. Once all the relevant texts were organised, we reviewed the passages associated with each category (i.e. inside each conceptual ‘container’) to search for internal consistency. The information inside each consistent container was used to derive the concepts and components of the WCF. In this way, we derived design principles and

values for designing for WX as well as operational items that would help designers to operationalise the WX’s principles and values to establish wearability requirements and design physical tags that afford good wearability for animals.

We report below some examples of how we used this process. In Casper (2009), potential impacts and recommendations (in italics) were used as follow:

“Electronic devices may emit acoustic frequencies or light spectra to which animals are potentially sensitive. For example, some mammalian species use acoustic signals for communication and foraging and may modify their behaviour”. This revealed that the perception of acoustic and light frequencies may generate a sensory and behavioural impact, which affects the wearer’s experience in a negative way. In order not to have this influence, devices should not be perceived acoustically or visually, following the logic that if the device is not perceived, the stimulus exerted does not produce impact. This text excerpt was deductively coded as ‘perception’; at the same time, ‘sensory abilities’ was inductively recognised as a new conceptual ‘container’. In short, this passage was interpreted to infer the idea that sensory imperceptibility is a design principle for animal wearability, and it became an element of the main box containing all the principles found through this process. Also, this quote specified the kind of sensory capability (hearing, and sight) and activity (signalling for communication, and foraging) that involves that sensory capability. Thus, the passage was also used to identify animal characteristics and activities pertinent to wearability that would help designers to apply the principle. In summary, through this excerpt the principle of sensory imperceptibility was derived, meantime hearing, sight, animal communication, and foraging were extrapolated as important animal characteristics and activities to be considered.

“Enlarging the profile of an animal that burrows or moves through dense vegetation or narrow openings, such as winter-ice holes, may impede its normal movements, cause it to expend extra energy or become entrapped”. Multi information was collected from this excerpt. Firstly, it mentioned the animal body shape (that is, enlarging the profile). Secondly, the excerpt highlighted that each animal lives in species-specific environments (e.g. burrows, dense vegetation, and narrow openings). Thirdly, both body shape and environments might have a role in determining the wearability features of a device, as evidenced by the statement that the profile of the device (or the animals’ profile as altered by the device) might cause the wearer to become obstructed or entrapped. Therefore, in order to prevent the wearer from bumping into surfaces, getting caught, or expending additional energy, tags should not impair physical movements. This passage enabled us to infer another principle, physical unobtrusiveness, as well as to identify other particular animal characteristics, environments, and activities (i.e. body shape, close or open spaces, locomotion) that would help designers to apply the principle.

“The colour of equipment may influence the behaviour of animals, their social status and their vulnerability to predation”. This suggested that device features may potentially influence different individuals, such as wearers and other animals interacting with them. Thus, this extract was used to derive an interactors component in which the significant- others element accounts for the fact that the wearers need to be considered in their social (e.g. living in group) and ecological (e.g. prey/predator relationship) context.

With this procedure, the structure and content of the WCF was developed; this is illustrated and described in the next section.