During the early stages of the design ideation, the smart phone app was envisioned as a simple easy to use dog based networking app that worked in place and facilitated the typical face-to-face meetings that dog walkers generally experience in their local community walks.
This personal dog-based network could also utilise frequency and duration of meetings. One idea is to add tiers of ‘trustworthiness’ and to facilitate the emergence of a ‘levels of trust’ network that reflects the temporal nature of the network. So, an increase in frequency and/or duration would show as a higher level of trust, whilst a decrease would allow the ‘trust’ to be eroded over time. A system like this would deepen the place-making and experiential data visualisation. It would also allow for inclusion of interactive elements to enable community exchange.
The app was envisioned as working with a bluetooth device which would be attached to the dog’s collar and activated when the lead was clipped on.
