Designing Ethically with Animals: The Case for an Animal Centered Toolkit
Originally published: November 1, 2022 on pH-auna.com, revisited August 14, 2025
The Challenge of Designing for Animals
Designing with empathy is at the core of good design—but what happens when your intended user can’t speak for themselves, and are of a different species? Compared to working with humans (even those that might be non-verbal) animal centered design (ACD) introduces a deeper level of complexity. Designers must rely on observation, interpretation, and ethical imagination to understand animals’ experiences and needs.
As an animal centered designer, you’re tasked not only with crafting usable systems, but with making ethical decisions on behalf of a user whose feedback is non-verbal and whose perspective you can never fully inhabit. This calls for rigorous ethical reflection, grounded observation, and critical inquiry throughout the design process.
From Principles to Practice: A Gap in Ethical Tools
During my doctoral research into service dogs' interactions with buttons, switches, and access controls, I encountered several well-structured ethical frameworks. Most, however, were normative: offering high-level principles but limited support for real-time, context-specific decision-making.
In the field, I was constantly making moment-by-moment decisions influenced by my own ethical stance. The need became clear: a practical, adaptable tool to support designers in navigating ethical uncertainty in real-world ACD projects.
Introducing: The Ethics Toolkit for Animal-Centered Design
This need led to the creation of the Ethics Toolkit for Animal-Centered Design - a set of three templates designed to help designers reflect, plan, and adapt ethically across species-inclusive projects.
Here’s how it works:
Template 1: Designer’s Ethical Baseline
Encourages self-reflection on your understanding of the animal as a user and how that understanding shapes your role.Template 2: Project Ethical Baseline
Frames key aspects of the project: goals, intent, animal participation, harm minimization, and accountability.Template 3: Ethical Scenarios
Prompts designers to imagine and prepare for ethically charged situations and articulate project-specific ethical guidance.
Use and Share
The toolkit is published in the May 2022 issue of Frontiers in Veterinary Science.
🔗 Download the full paper here
I see this as a living resource. If you use or adapt the toolkit, I’d love to hear how. Your feedback can shape its next evolution. Feel free to share your experiences here.