Beyond Human-Centered Design: How Cats Made me a Better Design Researcher
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While in school, I ran a retirement home for geriatric cats. I took in two cats that were reaching their end-of-life and guided them through that process with grace, a lot of ugly-sobbing, and a stockpile of chicken-flavored baby food.
Amira found me as an undergraduate. When we moved off campus, my roommate and I adopted her childhood cat, a then-15-year old ragdoll. As someone who did not enjoy college, I found Amira to be a much-needed light. She yelled at me to get out of bed in the morning, enforced a strict 11:30pm bedtime, and always made me laugh. She followed me on to graduate school, where she kept me level-headed as I completed my thesis, taught engineering students, and lived alone for the first time. Amira passed away in June 2020, at the age of 19, once her body could no longer fight kidney disease.
Sammy came to me in graduate school, another 15-year-old ragdoll. He had big patches of fur missing, and itchy scabs that never seemed to heal. A couple months in, after time-consuming vet visits and lots of biopsies, we had a diagnosis — cryptococcus neoformans. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of it either. Neither had the vet. It’s a deadly neurological fungus, found in the excrement-filled homes of pigeons. Sammy died in my arms a week after his diagnosis; I only had him in my life for three months.
With both cats, I made so many changes to my home to ensure their comfort. I built step stools so they could still enjoy their favorite elevated nap spots without having to jump. I purchased a new, larger litter box that had no walls, so they didn’t have to step over anything with their fragile knees. I added mounds of cushioning and heating pads to their beds to ease their arthritic bones. I had five types of syringes, each with a different diameter, tip length, and milliliter count as I worked to find their preferred way to take medicine. When Amira’s kidney failure hit an all-time high, I switched her metal water bowl to a plastic foundation (do all cats have a plastic fetish?) to encourage her to drink more water. I even found myself altering newborn baby diapers to comfortably fit over their quadrupedal hips when they became incontinent.
These changes, among others, were so important to increasing not only their comfort, but their ability to easily navigate their surroundings within the limits of their bodies.
Every modification I made was data-driven. They stemmed from a watchful and critical eye— I kept excel sheets with habit records for the cats to track things like water consumption, litter box usage, and energy levels. I closely observed and made mental notes of their behavior — were they shifting around in their beds to find a comfortable sleeping position? Did they hesitate before jumping onto taller surfaces? Were they gravitating towards more warmer or cooler spots in the home?
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At the core of design research lies the question, how can I use data-driven insights to help solve problems, change environments or objects, and better suit the needs of those around me? These insights come from very similar, if not identical, methods to those I used above — ethnography, participant observation, behavior tracking, basic pattern finding. Except, when working with humans, while still messy and complicated creatures, we often have shared language on our side. Working with Amira and Sammy forced me to hone my craft beyond the realm of language and make deductions strictly from patterns found with very-close, frequent observation. If I was home with the cats, I was in research-mode watching them, searching for patterns, checking routines, documenting changes or notable incidences.
Amira and Sammy have long-since passed, but now I have two more cats, Luca and Otis — both under the age of five — who are continuing to teach me about what it means to be a design researcher.
These two boys are polar opposites in many ways. Luca, for example, prefers to play with green toys, ideally while also inside a green tunnel (don’t ask). He is neat, particular, cautious, and precise. He only likes wet food. Otis, on the other hand, will destroy just about any toy you place in front of him. He loves to play fetch, and is messy, reckless, loud, and a little goofy. He prefers dry food. Not only that, but Otis requires both vertical and horizontal distance to get the zoomies out, much more than Luca does. I recently learned that the six-foot tall tower I have is not big enough for Otis when I caught him attempting to scale the remaining wall above to reach the ceiling multiple times.
The type of research I do for these boys does not look a whole lot different than what it did for my end-of-life cat care. I am still keeping a watchful eye for health markers, but am more focused on using my observational skills to both enrich the lives of these indoor cats and make sure that they don’t damage my apartment in the process.
I have heard horror stories from other cat parents who have lost couches and chairs to claws, but neither Luca nor Otis have ever scratched or marked my furniture. Ever. And no, there wasn’t a kittenhood training period and no, I didn’t “just get lucky.” I was specifically and explicitly data-driven.
Upon moving into a new apartment, I placed a scratch pad or small sisal tower in every room of my house, moving it around until I learned, through cataloging patterns, where, why, and how the boys preferred to scratch. The number one driver for why Luca and Otis scratch is excitement. This means they scratch when it’s dinner time and when it’s play time. For them, it’s a means of exhausting their extra, pent-up energy. Because of this, I placed scratch boards in my kitchen (where they eat), and my living room and office (where we tend to play). I even prototyped a few different types of scratching surfaces — cardboard, sisal, fabric, even wicker — to see what would be a hit.
Not only do I use observational research to provide what my cats need, but I’m constantly reading secondary sources to expand my knowledge on cat behavior and nutrition. Much to my four-year-old self’s dismay, I did not grow up around cats. My father claimed to be allergic, although I have never seen him sneeze in the presence of any of my four cats so I’ll just leave it at that. My point, though, is that I knew nothing about cats when I started caring for them. How on earth does one train a kitten? What kind of enrichment does a cat need? How do I know if my cat is telling me to back off or asking for cuddles? What’s the best way to integrate a cat’s needs into my current routine and environment?
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The answers, for me, were in design research. Inquire, observe, ideate, prototype, test, iterate. I have found ways to cohabitate with my cats and enrich their lives through data, experimentation, and design. Call me a crazy-cat lady — even though that phrase is rooted in layers upon layers of misogyny (I’ll save that for another article) — but being a pet parent has not only sharpened my research skills, but it’s encouraged me to think about design research devoid of its human-centered origins. What happens when the user isn’t human? What if the user is an animal or plant? What happens if the user is the planet?
The phrase “user” has always made me a little itchy. It feels reductive to define a creature solely by its relationship to an object or environment, and I find that it siloes our design process into a specific temporospatial loop that is too singular for how life operates.
Newer design methodologies, such as life-centered design, ecological design, and even pluriversal design to a certain extent, aim to alter the way we conceptualize design’s intent and possibilities. Our human-centered paradigm, after all, is in part why our ozone is disintegrating and our planet warming at an alarming rate, and these frameworks encourage us to push beyond the human and consider nonhumans as key stakeholders.
I am a firm believer that design should not always be human-centered, and if we are to truly advocate for an inclusive design practice we must expand both our ecological boundaries and the ostensible limits of our methods. Ethnography and participant observation have historically focused only on the human, they are rooted in anthropology after all, but if we intentionally combine anthropological methods with things like animal behavioral studies and political ecology, I think we may find that our understanding of culture and what it means to communicate may shift in profound ways. Humans have always been at the center because we are human, and to remove ourself from that lens is impossible; however, to see beyond that lens, is not, and I think we are obligated to do so as participant creators of a joint future.