FarmJam 2017: Designing enrichment for farm animals

FarmJam 2017 took place on 21st November 2017, as a workshop of the 4th International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction, ACI2017, Milton Keynes, UK

Workshop outputs

Please follow links - PIGS, POULTRY and GOATS - to see some of our ideas for enriching the experiences of farm animals.

Call for participation

This workshop aims to bring together expertise from different disciplines and enable participants to network and move towards designing and developing exciting new enrichment experiences for farmed animals.

In particular, we will focus on practical solutions for enriching the lives of cattle, poultry and swine. Working with a set of briefs written by experts from the farm animal welfare community and provided with materials from farmers outlining their specific challenges, we will form teams to brainstorm concepts and present ideas to the group. The structure will follow the format of last year's successful ZooJam when the focus was on hunting enrichment for predators, which generated a range of exciting concepts for penguins, sealions and big cats.

Importantly, given our one-day time constraint, we will not spend time discussing the ethics of associating ACI with food-farmed animal production, assuming that participants have already made a commitment to be involved in the workshop in order to focus on improving animal welfare.

We aim to raise awareness of the challenges facing farmed livestock and their owners and handlers, as well as devise realistic and appropriate interventions that could alleviate some of the stress experienced by the animals and enhance their welfare by offering opportunities for them to express some of their natural behaviours via interactive media interventions. The workshop output will be shared publicly.

We invite participants from a wide range of communities, including but not limited to game design, computer science, engineering, education, HCI and ACI, farm personnel, animal behaviour and environmental enrichment. This is an opportunity for those with an interest in farm animal welfare to share ideas and explore the potential of using technology to enhance enrichment.

Please visit: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aci2017.
Select: New Submission/Workshop: Designing enrichment for farm animals
We would like participants to submit a short description of their relevant expertise and how this might contribute to the topics under discussion.