Speaking for animals: design opportunities through tensions in multispecies activism

Abstract

Design research increasingly engages with diverse forms of justice, care, and activism. Yet, the implications for interactive technologies that benefit beyond human-centric interactions remain limited. This paper examines community animal rights activism in Türkiye against silencing during a period of systematic removal of community animals from public space, forced by the introduction of a new national law. Our contribution is the rationale for participants’ activism, driven by their collective and individual struggles against the silencing of multispecies neighbourhoods. The Turkish context provides a critical case for HCI and design, while animals in Türkiye are naturally accepted as urban co-inhabitants, and the everyday practices of multispecies care, negotiation, and coexistence have been core to neighbourhood life. Through twelve interviews, we examined how rights advocacy and collective action are practised for community animals in urban neighbourhoods and proposed an agenda to translate these learnings into tech-driven design intervention practices through co-creative potentials.