The Pathways project begins with companion animals and the delight of the co-performance of the dog walk.
Walking with a companion animal in the self same locality that I had walked around for decades was a distinct and different experience.
The Pathways and Paws(es) backstory begins with a personal desire to get a dog for company because the family had all grown up and left home and recognition that I needed some kind of structure to engage in physical activity. The importance of companion animals and regular physical activity is well known, particularly with reference to active aging. Ensuring capacity for animal companionship for seniors is not without its dilemmas but the importance of facilitating companionship for health and well-being can be seen in the number of enterprises which aim to foster change towards more pet-friendly environments.
Engaging with the inner urban neighborhood as “co-performing” partnership changes a number of experiences. The most obvious being the exchanges with other people during the walk, People stop and greet you through the medium of the dog. This phenomenon is perhaps in part due to the fact that my dog is pretty cute and looks not unlike Hairy Maclary of Donaldson’s Dairy fame, and in part due to the different paths one takes with a dog (through parks where families gather), but it adds up to what Lisa Wood calls social lubrication and strengthened social capital.
That pets can help build social capital is not just a social nicety or quirky sociological observation. Hundreds of studies internationally show that social capital is a positive predictor for a raft of important social indicators, including mental health, education, crime deterrence, and community safety.
The very first Pathways and Paws(es) project concepts were all about facilitating a locality-based dog walker’s network. The core concept was that access to a place-based network of other (known) walkers would both facilitate social interaction (someone to walk with perhaps) and provide some sense of additional security, someone known and nearby to ping in the event of an emergency.
We were focused on the idea of place-based communities for the network and wanted to avoid a network constructed in the placeless-ness of cyberspace and this led us into consideration of slow cities and the importance of creating place through grass roots activity. The designing started with some scenarios.
And a review of currently available commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) GPS tracking apps.
There are numerous off the shelf GPS apps that could be used as a basis for such a network but they tend to show the path taken and so flatten the actual experience of the journey. We wanted to show the ‘pauses’ – places where conversations have taken place or where the walker has stopped to allow their companion animal do engage in animal business.
