# Charting Ethical Tensions in Multispecies Technology Research through
Beneficiary-Epistemology Space

Steve Benford  University of NottinghamNottinghamUnited Kingdom
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Clara Mancini  The Open UniversityMilton
KeynesUnited Kingdom<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Alan Chamberlain  University
of NottinghamNottinghamUnited Kingdom<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,
Eike Schneiders  University of NottinghamNottinghamUnited Kingdom
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Simon Castle-Green  University of
NottinghamNottinghamUnited Kingdom<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Joel
Fischer  University of NottinghamNottinghamUnited Kingdom
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Ayse Kucukyilmaz  University of
NottinghamNottinghamUnited Kingdom<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Guido
Salimbeni  University of NottinghamNottinghamUnited Kingdom
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Victor Ngo  University of
NottinghamNottinghamUnited Kingdom<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Pepita
Barnard  University of NottinghamNottinghamUnited Kingdom
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Matt Adams  ,  Nick Tandavanitj  and  Ju
Row Farr  Blast TheoryBrightonUnited Kingdom<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
(2024)

###### Abstract.

While ethical challenges are widely discussed in HCI, far less is reported
about the ethical processes that researchers routinely navigate. We reflect on
a multispecies project that negotiated an especially complex ethical approval
process. Cat Royale was an artist-led exploration of creating an artwork to
engage audiences in exploring trust in autonomous systems. The artwork took
the form of a robot that played with three cats. Gaining ethical approval
required an extensive dialogue with three Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)
covering computer science, veterinary science and animal welfare, raising
tensions around the welfare of the cats, perceived benefits and appropriate
methods, and reputational risk to the University. To reveal these tensions we
introduce beneficiary-epistemology space, that makes explicit who benefits
from research (humans or animals) and underlying epistemologies. Positioning
projects and IRBs in this space can help clarify tensions and highlight
opportunities to recruit additional expertise.

Animal-Computer Interaction, Animal Ethics, Research Ethics, Ethical Review,
IRB, Art, Artist-led research, Veterinary-Science, Medical Science,
Epistemology

††journalyear: 2024††copyright: rightsretained††conference: Proceedings of the
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems; May 11–16, 2024;
Honolulu, HI, USA††booktitle: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI,
USA††doi: 10.1145/3613904.3641994††isbn: 979-8-4007-0330-0/24/05††ccs: Human-
centered computing Human computer interaction (HCI)††ccs: General and
reference Design††ccs: Computer systems organization Robotic autonomy††ccs:
Applied computing Media arts

##  1\. Introduction

Although many of us routinely engage with ethical review and Institutional
Review Boards (IRBs), there is little reflection on ethical review processes
within HCI. This is somewhat surprising given that (i) we are a broad
interdisciplinary field drawing together different perspectives that may be in
tension; (ii) we increasingly focus on vulnerable communities such as
children, people with disabilities and marginalised groups, who may require
special ethical consideration; and (iii) we are a relatively young community,
typically without our own dedicated IRBs, and so must often seek ethical
approval from others. It is a particularly significant omission as HCI turns
its attention towards animals as part of multispecies interactions, as
historically these stakeholders have proved to be especially vulnerable in
terms of their relationship to research and so are now often the subject of
strict ethical review processes.

There has of course been some reflection on ethical review processes within
HCI. Brown at al.’s five ethical provocations encourage us to reappraise
established processes inherited from medical ethics (Brown et al., 2016),
while Munteanu et al.’s reflections on seeking ethical approval for projects
involving vulnerable communities advocate for iterative dialogue with IRBs
(Munteanu et al., 2015). As we discuss further below, two specific areas in
which ethical processes have been discussed in some depth are artist-led HCI,
where artists undertake exploratory and sometimes provocative projects that
transgress accepted norms (Benford et al., 2013), and, of course, Animal
Computer-Interaction (ACI), where complex challenges arise concerning animals’
consent and autonomy (Mancini and Nannoni, 2022).

This paper reflects on how one particular project negotiated ethical approval.
The project was especially challenging because it combined artist-led HCI with
ACI. Cat Royale was a digital artwork, developed by professional artists Blast
Theory in partnership with HCI researchers with the overall aim of exploring
the trustworthiness of autonomous systems. This was to be achieved by striving
to create a so-called ‘utopia’ for a family of three cats, a purposefully
designed living space at the centre of which a robot would try to enrich their
lives by playing with them. From the outset, this somewhat ambiguous artistic
framing was intended to provoke audiences to reflect on the role of utopian
and dystopian visions of autonomous systems (both for the cats and by
extension for people) while also delivering the most positive experience
possible for the cats. In practice, the project negotiated many specific
ethical issues concerning the welfare and autonomy of the cats which needed to
be carefully resolved. However, specific challenges and design details are not
our primary focus here. Rather we are concerned with the eighteen-month long
ethical review journey that involved a dialogue with three separate IRBs to
shape the project.

In many ways, Cat Royale was a surprising project, having emerged as the
artists’ creative response to the challenge of trustworthy autonomous systems.
The ethical review process was a constructive and ultimately successful one,
during which many colleagues made extensive efforts to help us identify and
resolve ethical issues, expending extra efforts beyond the formalities of
reviewing official paperwork. Our aim is to surface this important and often
hidden work of ethical review in a way that can be useful to others.
Colleagues on those IRBs were shown versions of this paper as it evolved and
one of the review boards invited us back to present the outcomes of the
project afterwards.

While Cat Royale was a highly unusual project, we suggest that our reflections
raise wider considerations for ethical review process in HCI, especially for
projects adopting multispecies and ‘beyond human-centred’ (Wakkary, 2021)
perspectives, including those focused on animals’ direct interactions with
technologies, but potentially many others that might consider the inadvertent
impacts of digital technologies on animals in the wider environment. In this
spirit, we contribute a new framework, beneficiary-epistemology space, to
enable future projects to position themselves in relation to their IRBs,
according to whom might be considered as benefitting from the research (humans
and/or animals) and to underlying epistemologies that determine what might be
viewed as valid research, and so anticipate tensions likely to emerge during
ethical review.

##  2\. Related Work

Below we highlight relevant previous work, which includes general discussions
of ethical review processes in HCI, and specific accounts of the challenges of
approving artist-led and ACI research.

###  2.1. Ethical processes within HCI

Engaging in formal ethical review is a routine matter for many HCI
researchers, who need to justify their proposed work in terms of its benefits
to society, while providing reassurance that risks of potential harm have been
considered and duly mitigated. Many of us follow local or national ethical
review processes as stipulated by our institutions and/or funding bodies.
Indeed, publication at CHI (or any other ACM venue) requires adherence to
ACM’s Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and
Subjects which states: “ACM authors must ensure that their human research
planning, conduct, and reporting are consistent with their local governing
laws and regulations” (Board, 2021).

Aspects of research proposals that are typically of concern for IRBs include
whether proposed activities might pose any direct or indirect risks for human
participants (e.g. to their body, psyche, resources, reputation, privacy,
relations), on what grounds said risks are worth taking (i.e. whether they are
warranted by envisaged benefits) and how they will be mitigated (Research and
Innovation, 2023b). As a risk factor, plans for handling collected data are
also of concern for IRBs (e.g., secure storage, anonymisation,
confidentiality, destruction after a set period), as envisaged by
international regulations (e.g., (Consulting, 2016)). Moreover, how
participants will be enabled to provide informed consent to their involvement
and to effectively withdraw from research activities is an essential
consideration for IRBs (e.g., (Research and Innovation, 2023a)). The bar is
even higher when it comes to so called non-competent participants (e.g. young
children, persons with limited mental capacity), who are deemed unable to
provide informed consent to their involvement and who may be involved with the
consent of proxies acting in the participants’ best interests (e.g. parents,
legal guardians) (Research and Innovation, 2023c).

There has also been reflection on the adequacy of current forms of ethical
review from within HCI. Brown et al. (2016) offered five provocations to kick-
start discussion: (i) “written informed consent does little to protect
participants”; (ii) “interventions with vulnerable populations must result in
greater benefit for them than for the researchers”; (iii) “anonymisation
should be an option presented alongside co-creation of research with
participants, not a default”; (iv) “institutional IRBs delay and damage
research out of proportion to any harm they prevent” and (v) “publication of
research performed with, or within, a commercial entity should be blocked
until the complete dataset is made available to others”. They propose three
practical responses: differentiate between practice and law, support low-risk
ethical experimentation, and think more deeply about the definition of harm.
When considering the role of IRBs, they highlight how the dynamic nature of
HCI research often requires changes to protocols between design and
implementation; suggest that review by other disciplines can introduce
“nonsensical requirements”; and argue for “researcher and institutional
responsibility rather than legalistic bureaucracy”.

Munteanu et al. (2015) reflect across four cases of seeking formal ethical
approval for HCI research with vulnerable populations including people with
low literacy, parents of sick infants, soldiers, and visually impaired
individuals. In contrast to Brown et al.’s provocation (Brown et al., 2016),
they highlight how dialogue between researchers and IRBs led to a satisfactory
resolution and call for researchers to see boards as research partners and to
engage with other disciplines when they enter new interdisciplinary territory.
They propose five principles to enable the development of a “situational
ethics” framework for HCI: looking for ethical triggers, adjusting protocols
in the field, dialoguing with IRBs, assembling multi-disciplinary teams,
ensuring IRBs have multi-disciplinary expertise, and becoming involved in
revising ethical guidelines. Our paper is a response to both Brown et al.’s
(Brown et al., 2016) provocations and Munteanu et al.’s (Munteanu et al.,
2015) reflections. The multidisciplinary and multispecies aspects of our
project also required us to engage with two specific areas of ethical process,
discussed below.

Broadening our perspective beyond HCI, researchers from the Social Sciences
have voiced concerns about ethical review processes and the role of IRBs,
especially the dangers of importing pre-emptive ethical regulation from
biomedical science (Dingwall, 2008). One concern is that IRBs may undermine
academic freedom in the interests of managing reputational risk to
institutions by seeking to avoid embarrassment, litigation, and threats to
funding (Lincoln and Tierney, 2004); weeding out politically sensitive studies
(Moss, 2007); and employing bureaucratic process as a “serendipitous device to
frustrate and deter what is considered a potential threat to an institution’s
reputation or access to revenue sources” (Librett and Perrone, 2010). A second
concern is that underlying epistemological differences may lead IRB’s to seek
to make research proposals appear more conventional from their perspectives.
This may arise from a lack of appreciation of alternative research paradigms
and the diversity of data involved, or even prejudice regarding what
constitutes valid research, and has been noted as a particular challenge for
those employing qualitative, participatory, action and critical theory methods
(Lincoln and Tierney, 2004). While many have voiced concerns about the role of
IRBs, Stark notes a tendency for researchers to report “horror stories”, and
calls for greater mutual understanding and dialogue that respects and
negotiates mutual subjectivities, including meetings in addition to formal
paperwork (Stark, 2007). However, Martin and Inwood observe that direct
discussions with IRBs can be fraught with power differences, especially when
students, early career and/or untenured researchers are involved, and so call
for “open discussion of the power dynamics, subjectivities, and challenges of
formal ethical research structures” (Martin and Inwood, 2012).

###  2.2. Ethical review process in artist-led HCI

HCI’s turn to the cultural has brought the creativity of artists to bear on
its research, for example, through activist art for sustainability (DiSalvo et
al., 2009), improvisation techniques for disruptive innovation (Andersen et
al., 2018), and employing discomfort for enlightenment, entertainment and
sociality (Benford et al., 2013), while simultaneously extending HCI’s methods
to better meet the needs of artists (Edmonds, 2014). This has also challenged
HCI’s ethical processes. For example, Reilly et al. (2014) reflect on the
process of negotiating ethical approval for the public art installation
Tweetris, including: not having a priori research questions that could be
answered through controlled experimentation; difficulty modifying approved
protocols as the artwork evolved; and obtaining informed consent for walk-up
participation.

A gathering of artists, HCI researchers, and ethicists to share experiences of
ethical challenges and processes highlighted distinctive artistic perspectives
contrasting with those imported from Medical Science via experimental
Psychology (Benford et al., 2015). Participants reported how tensions arose
from multiple-overlapping ethical frames: artists typically operate according
to the ethical processes of the professional artworld, but these are typically
quite different from those of institutional research. The relationships
between these frames can become particularly confused when the artists choose
to ambiguously blur the relationship between art and science, for example,
adopting the persona of a scientist in a performance. A second tension
concerned the idea of doing ethics throughout a project, including “on the way
out”, referring to the engagement of audiences in ethical debate after the
experience, and possibly with a lighter touch beforehand. They further noted
how artists draw on their carefully honed professional judgement to
dynamically negotiate the boundaries of consent and withdrawal, which are
typically personal, fluid and contingent, while recognising that this can be
challenging and difficult territory. Finally, participants highlighted the
challenge of data veracity especially in situations where artists appear to
introduce elements of science, a finding that was reinforced by a subsequent
study of the creative use of physiological ‘biodata’ in promotional filmmaking
(Reeves et al., 2015).

###  2.3. Ethical review and disciplinary assumptions in ACI

HCI’s growing interest in Animal-Computer Interaction and turn to designing
for more than human-centred worlds (Wakkary, 2021), raises distinctive ethical
challenges concerning the involvement of animals and potentially other non-
human stakeholders. Research involving animals is usually the responsibility
of institutional ethical review bodies and is informed by relevant legislation
(e.g. (Council, 2010; ASPA, 2012)). An underlying assumption of such
legislation is that being involved in research is rarely in the animals’
interests, on the grounds that they do not have the intellectual capacity to
consent to procedures that may harm them, and that the individuals involved
are effectively used for a greater good, which may include benefits to the
environment, to species of flora and fauna and, above all, to humans.
Consistent with this assumption, the principles of Replacement, Reduction and
Refinement (3Rs) (Russell and Burch, 1959), whose application is now generally
regarded as the gold standard of humane research, require that: whenever
possible, animals be replaced by other methods or simpler species be used
instead of more complex ones; the number of animals involved be reduced to a
minimum necessary for statistical power; and protocols be refined to minimise
suffering before, during and after procedures. Although the protection of
research animals is ultimately subordinated to the integrity of scientific
procedures (Mancini and Nannoni, 2022), researchers must make a compelling
case for their use by highlighting the potential societal benefits of planned
work and, critically, by demonstrating the quality of their scientific method.
This means formulating clear hypotheses that can be validated by falsification
of reasonable alternatives and accumulation of empirical evidence, with
emphasis on quantification and reproducibility, to formulate theories that
have predictive power (e.g., (Popper, 2005)). In many contemporary societies,
the scientific method (with the scientific evidence it produces) constitutes,
at least in principle, the foundation for policy development, on the grounds
of its presumed objectivity. Ultimately, because objectively measuring
animals’ intellectual capacities and emotional experience is hard, in
legislation there remains an assumption that, while they can be used as
objects of study, animals cannot be regarded as subjects capable of
understanding, consenting to and participating in research activities.

In marked contrast, and paralleling human-centred values inherited from HCI,
ACI takes a fundamentally different approach to the ethics of research
involving animals. At least in principle, ACI adopts an animal-centred
perspective grounded not only in animal welfare frameworks (e.g., (Väätäjä,
2014; Webber et al., 2022)) but also in political philosophies of multispecies
justice, with an emphasis on animals’ agency, capabilities and dignity (e.g.,
(Mancini et al., 2023; van der Linden, 2023)). Consistent with this
perspective, ACI researchers have proposed ethical frameworks for the
involvement of animals in research((Väätäjä and Pesonen, 2013; Hirskyj-Douglas
and Read, 2016; Mancini, 2017)) as well as approaches to support researchers’
ethical engagement with individuals during research activities (Ruge and
Mancini, 2022) . Akin to ethical principles for biomedical research with
vulnerable humans (Beauchamp and Childress, 2001), Mancini and Nannoni (2022)
have proposed the principles of Relevance, Impartiality, Welfare and Consent
as a counterpoint to the 3Rs, aiming to problematize the 3Rs’ applicability to
ACI research and to complement the 3Rs’ application to animal research beyond
ACI. These principles require the research to benefit partaking animals, to
ensure the highest standards of treatment regardless of species, the
protection of partakers’ wellbeing always, and the provision of opportunities
for them to consent or dissent to their involvement (in the complementary
forms of mediated consent provided by legal guardians and contingent consent
provided by the animals themselves). These protections are not predicated on
pre-established animal capacities, but rather on animals’ role as research
participants and autonomous agents regardless of any capacities of sentience,
abstraction, rationality or language.

The recognition of animals as autonomous agents and legitimate participants
with a stake in research is aligned with critiques of anthropocentrism (e.g.,
(Moore, 1906; Kohn, 2013)), which decentralize the human by defining agency,
not in terms of intellectual capacity, but as the capacity of interconnected
organisms (and even non-organic actors (Latour, 2007)) to influence and change
one another (Haraway, 2008). Furthermore, these critiques reject the idea of
scientific objectivity and question the reliability of scientific knowledge,
instead highlighting the situatedness of knowledges, which are constructed as
individuals engage with the world and attribute meaning to worldly
interactions (Haraway, 2016). In line with these positions, alongside work
that applies the scientific method (e.g., (Zeagler et al., 2014; Byrne et al.,
2017; Majikes et al., 2017; Paci et al., 2017)), ACI researchers have drawn on
fields such as anthropology (e.g. (Sadetzki and Hirsch-Matsioulas, 2022),
anthrozoology (Westerlaken and Gualeni, 2016), multispecies ethnography (e.g.,
(Mancini et al., 2012)) and ethnomethodology (e.g., (Aspling and Juhlin,
2017)), or speculative design (Lawson et al., 2015), to frame multispecies
notions of participation and co-design (Mancini and Lehtonen, 2018a), and to
propose participatory methods for dealing with interspecies differences and
communication barriers (Robinson et al., 2014) in ACI research.

However, critiques of ethics of relationality and entanglement (Giraud, 2019)
highlight how situatedness inevitably implies exclusion, whereby ethical and
methodological choices that define research projects exclude other
possibilities while being necessary to enable researchers to address specific
questions. This also concerns decisions on whether and how to involve animals
in research, which are made on the animals’ behalf and inevitably limit the
animals’ agency. In this regard, ACI researchers (Mancini and Lehtonen, 2018b)
have highlighted how, in multispecies interaction design, research set-ups
that foster semiotic, volitional and choiceful engagement can support a
process of progressive orientation towards animal-centred outcomes that may
never be fully reached, but that can be incrementally approximated, despite
inevitable limitations. At the same time, ACI researchers (Mancini et al.,
2022) have stressed the importance of considering the political implications
of ACI research beyond specific projects. This requires being mindful of how
research taking place within limitations imposed by socio-economic contexts
that are not animal-centred may impact animals beyond specific ACI projects.
Articulating and negotiating the ethical boundaries between the project and
these wider contexts was a key challenge for Cat Royale.

##  3\. A Brief Introduction to Cat Royale

Cat Royale was part of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub, a national
research programme in autonomous systems which included a Creative Programme
for artists to make new work to engage the public and media. Blast Theory were
the programme’s Creative Ambassadors, charged with delivering a flagship
artwork, and Cat Royale was their response. From the outset, the project was
driven by two goals. The first was to surface the matter of trust in
autonomous systems by exploring whether people would trust a robot to look
after their loved ones as represented by cats. The second was to consider how
autonomous systems might benefit companion animals by exploring whether a
robot could successfully play with the cats.

The artists deliberately and ambiguously framed Cat Royale as intending to
provide a ‘utopia’ for cats. On the one hand their aim was to create a bespoke
and luxurious environment that would cater to the cats’ various needs (Ellis
et al., 2013), including using a robot to enrich their lives through play, and
using AI to learn their preferences and measure their resulting ‘happiness’.
On the other, this framing was deliberately intended to provoke questions in
the viewer: what would a utopia for cats be like? How could AI measure their
happiness? Could we trust the robot and the AI with the cats? And how might
this translate to humans? We now briefly summarise the design and experience
of Cat Royale as background to help better understand its journey through the
ethical approval process. Further overviews of Cat Royale can be found in
(Schneiders et al., 2023, 2024c, 2024b) while (Schneiders et al., 2024a)
provides a detailed account of the design of the robot and the enclosure,
concluding that it is important to carefully design the world in which a robot
operates.

###  3.1. The design of Cat Royale

The design of Cat Royale emerged iteratively. At the core of its final version
was a purpose-built enclosure designed to be inhabited by a small family of
three cats (a parent and two offspring). The cats lived here for six hours a
day, split into two three-hour long periods with a break of several hours
between. It provided ample space, with dens, perches, walkways for jumping,
sleeping and observing; as well as a scratching post, a water fountain, cat
grass, feeding stations and litter trays to be suitable for the three cats, as
advised by experts in cat welfare. Its design was specifically informed by the
sensory, cognitive and physical characteristics of cats, for example, in the
choice of colours suitable for dichromatic vision, surface coverage suitable
for clawed limbs, etc. The enclosure was also designed to appear luxurious to
human observers, through its visually eye-catching bespoke interior design.

Inside the enclosure was a robot arm, securely mounted to the floor adjacent
to an accessory rack with four slots, on which various attachments holding
toys could be placed, ready for it to pick them up and deploy them. Example
activities included dangling and waving various soft toys on strings, slowly
dragging a feather boa across the floor and dropping balls into a tube from
which they would emerge to roll across the ondulated floor. The robot could
also offer treats (kibble and meat sticks) on a tray. The arm was a Kinova
Gen3 lite, a lightweight robot arm equipped with a non-interchangeable two-
finger gripper. This was chosen to be strong enough to be able to lift the
toys off the racks and wield them, but weak enough that it would not harm the
cats should it accidentally collide with them. Custom toy attachments enabled
the robot to retrieve the toys from the rack when required, and store them
back out of the cats’ reach when no longer needed. The attachments adhered
magnetically to the rack to minimise the risk of the toys being accidentally
dropped on or deliberately ripped down by the cats.

Figure 1. The the three cats (Clover, Pumpkin, and Ghostbuster) playing with a
toy (left) and the robot arm lifting the feather helicopter toy from the rack
(right)

On the left of this figure we see an image of three cats playing together with
a small soft toy that is being dangled on string by a robot arm that hovers
above them. On the right we see a picture of the enclosure within which this
happened showing its striking decorative design and with the robot arm
positioned at the centre, The robot has just lifted a toy attached to a rod
from off of one of four raised racks in front of it.

Every ten minutes, the arm would attempt to engage the cats by picking up a
new toy or offering a treat. This would involve executing a programmed
movement sequence for the object that the artists had designed and tested
beforehand. This would be combined with various generically useful actions
such as picking attachments off the racks, replacing them, and the robot
folding itself down into a safe ‘off’ position when inactive.

Outside the enclosure, the artists monitored the cats from behind one way
glass mirrors, manually rating their engagement with each game using the
Participation in Play scale (Ellis, 2022), a tool used in Veterinary Science
to measure behavioural indicators of wellbeing in cats through ordinal scales
that rate aspects of play, such as playing enthusiastically or tentatively,
playing while moving or stationary, watching toys passively without engaging,
appearing disinterested, or retreating. The results were fed into an AI
‘decision engine’ that attempted to learn which toys and treats the cats
preferred, and that would then recommend the next toy or treat to be offered,
which the artists could accept or reject (recording the reasons for their
decision).

A cat Welfare Officer, with post-graduate level qualification in animal
behaviour and working professionally in animal welfare, continually monitored
the cats for any signs of stress while they were in the enclosure and in the
studio, and trained other members of the team to do so too. They took notes on
the cats’ behaviour and regularly completed the Cat Stress Score (Kessler and
Turner, 1997), feeding their observations back during a daily meeting of
project management team that included artists, veterinarians, and selected
researchers, who continuously reviewed how the project should be adjusted.
Strict protocols were drawn up for closing several layers of doors so that the
cats could not wander into the unfamiliar and potentially dangerous
environment beyond the enclosure.

A human robot-operator oversaw the operation of the robot, triggering its pre-
programmed sequences and sometimes having to improvise movements to untangle
it from unexpected situations. They had to continuously hold down a button (a
‘deadman’s switch’) to enable the robot to move, preventing it from performing
any movement without explicit authorisation from the operator, and controlled
an additional emergency stop button, situated directly in front of them, that
would instantly shut down the power to the robot in an emergency. These
various measures implemented a strict supervisory control paradigm (Sheridan,
1992) whereby at least one human always observed the operation and was
responsible for ensuring safety. A toy-wrangler was tasked with loading toys
onto the rack and maintaining them and the enclosure.

Finally, the enclosure was constantly filmed using eight embedded cameras,
whose outputs were mixed by an experienced television vision-mixer to produce
video material with annotations labelling the games, cats and estimated
happiness scores. This was subsequently edited into an seven-hour long movie
to be shown to the public as a touring installation for art galleries as well
as a series of short daily highlights released on YouTube.

###  3.2. The experience of Cat Royale

Over the course of twelve days the robot experimented with over 500 games and
treats. The installation run safely and the cats did not show signs of stress;
at no point were they withdrawn or was the emergency stop button deployed. The
cats quickly settled into the environment and usually engaged enthusiastically
with both toys and treats. They mostly avoided direct physical contact with
the robot arm itself, focusing their attention on the toys. A typical play
sequence was for one or more cats to observe from a high perch as the robot
retrieved a toy, before descending to crouch on the floor, before then
physically engaging with the toy (biting, pawing or batting) for up to several
minutes. Over time the cats became more confident and assertive with the toys.
Clover, in particular, was persistent in her interactions with the robot,
eventually working out how to exert sufficient force that the robot-operator
had to trigger the robot to let go of the toy, allowing her to drag her prize
away across the enclosure and out of its reach. The robot often got into
various tangles as strings got wrapped around it or balls dropped in the wrong
places, which required manual improvisation from the operator to resolve. The
system learned that the cats preferred certain toys; the ‘feather helicopter’
was a favourite. Generally, all the cats made ample use of the space and of
the resources within it, for example, lounging in the elevated dens,
patrolling the suspended walkways and rolling surfaces, availing themselves of
the concealed litter trays, and savouring the fountain’s running water.

The edited film has been exhibited three times so far, there has been national
press coverage, and discussion on social media, with the artists fielding many
questions, but nothing to suggest an outcry or backlash against the project.

However, the point of this paper is not to break down the detailed design or
experience of Cat Royale, nor to examine in what respects it did, or did not,
succeed for the cats or wider audience. Rather, we reflect on how the project
negotiated a complex ethical process and various ethical challenges during its
design and development.

##  4\. Cat Royale’s Ethical Review Process

The ethical design and review process passed through four distinct stages:
initial discussions of ethical challenges, processes, and available expertise
within the project, followed by engagement with three separate IRBs: the
University-wide Animal Welfare and Ethical Review Body (AWERB), the Computer
Science Ethics Review Committee (CSREC); and the Vet School’s Committee for
Animals and Research Ethics (CARE). We now explain how each of the stages
unfolded, focusing on how they revealed different perspectives on both the
beneficiaries of the project, and the underlying validity of its methods and
resulting knowledge.

###  4.1. Initial internal ethical discussions

It was understood from the outset that Cat Royale was a complex ethical
proposition. The artists’ clear intention in proposing the idea was to create
a situation in which people would be invited to explore their feelings about
trust and autonomy in relation to AI and robots. Getting cats to live and play
with a robot in a so-called ‘utopia’ was a carefully pitched provocation in
this regard, and one that many people found intriguing but also somewhat
uncomfortable.

We recognised the importance of involving expertise in cat welfare and
behaviour from early on and so invited experts in animal-computer interaction
and ethics, and veterinary behavioural medicine and feline behaviour to the
team. We also solicited advice from our national society for animal protection
and established a fifteen-strong Audience Advisory Panel (AAP) with varied
interests in the arts, technology and cats, who met five times as a group.

Early discussions among this expanded team surfaced four key ethical
challenges. The first concerned the choice to work with cats. This was in part
an aesthetic choice as cats were felt to combine a compelling cuteness with an
enigmatic sense of autonomy and aloofness alongside an established Internet
presence. However, it was also a practical choice due to their moderate size.

Our second challenge was whether the work (and cats) should be located at a
public gallery or whether the team and robot should travel to the cats.
Ultimately, we decided to locate the enclosure, the cats and their owner at
the artists’ private studio, while public venues hosted video installations.

The third challenge concerned the idea that the system would somehow measure
‘cat happiness’. The artists felt this to be an ambiguously provocative
proposition for the audience; the computer scientists developing the
technology were looking for something that could be readily implemented; but
animal researchers worried about the scientific validity of an overarching and
simplistic idea of happiness. Ultimately the decision was taken to adopt the
Participation in Play scale (Ellis, 2022) with the rationale that it would
best represent the AI’s own view of happiness – i.e., that its task was to
play with cats to make them happy.

Our fourth challenge concerned the autonomy of the cats. To what extent would
their engagement be voluntary and consensual? Could they choose to withdraw
from the robot or the enclosure? Ultimately, the enclosure was designed to
afford them ample opportunities to autonomously approach or avoid the
immediate vicinity of the robot, while the decision to remove them from the
enclosure rested with the Cat Welfare Officer, their owner, and the artists.
The challenge of constraining the cats’ autonomy was to resurface throughout
our subsequent discussions with IRBs, and to some extent, ultimately remained
unresolved as an inherent tension in the work intended to provoke the audience
to consider the wider implications of AI.

###  4.2. Discussions with the Animal Welfare and Ethical Review Body (AWERB)

In our country there are strict laws and regulations governing the use of
animals in research and the work of all establishments that conduct research
with animals is overseen by AWERBs to ensure that projects comply with the law
and that the animals involved are duly protected. Our AWERB includes
veterinarians, animal welfare officers, scientists and lay people, and advises
staff on the acquisition, welfare, housing and use of animals in research.
Their remit includes considering “the scientific benefit of the work weighed
against the cost to the animals involved” and “the application of the 3R’s
(Reduction, Refinement and Replacement)”.

AWERB members were generous in engaging in informal discussion to help us
shape our formal ethics application. One issue that arose in relation to the
wider framing of the project concerned its intended beneficiaries. As one
advisor informally observed: “…you state the primary goal of the work is cat
welfare, but that doesn’t come through very clearly in the background where
the purpose appears to be about exploring the public’s ambivalence around
automated systems”. They further noted that “at the moment the benefits to the
cats don’t come through ‘til later in the case, and it could be read as being
primarily an art installation.”

A second question concerned the validity of our methods and the knowledge we
would produce. Our initial formal application to AWERB received the feedback
that the application could not be approved because: “there was no clear
experimental design”, and “the type of data that you want to collect needs
clarifying”.

In our revision and resubmission, we rewrote our objectives, trying to clarify
and balance potential benefits to cats and humans. We also tried to clarify
our epistemological and methodological position as a response to concerns
about ‘experimental design’ and ‘data capture’, explaining that our project
was intended to be a combination of (i) a technology development project that
“follows a co-design process that involves stakeholders (in this case humans
and animals) early on and unfolds through a series of iterations” and (ii) an
artwork seeking to “engage a wider public in reflecting on the consequences of
introducing new autonomous technologies into the home; on the welfare of and
their relationships to their companion animals; and to promote the idea that
such technologies need to be designed for and with animals.” We further
explained that this was not intended to be a “scientific project that involves
a series of cat research experiments, or that employs autonomous systems to
test hypotheses about feline psychology and behaviour”.

AWERB’s response to our revised submission was to allow the project to
proceed, at least to the next stage of being able to engage cats with the
robot as part of the unfolding design process, while requesting updates from
us alongside pro-active feedback to help the University’s media department
respond to any public or media queries. They “appreciated that the data
collected may be largely subjective, not objective” but noted that “there was
still uncertainty and concern over the ‘art versus science’ divide and the
possibility of reputational damage for the university”. The latter comment led
us to clarify our communications strategy by nominating the artists and
principal research investigator as media and public contact points, while
other researchers maintained their anonymity (at least during the initial
filming and public engagement phase); anticipating public and media questions
and planning responses; undertaking media engagement training; and briefing
the University press office so that it could handle inquiries.

###  4.3. Discussions with the Computer Science Research Ethics Committee
(CSREC)

The next step in our ethical review process was to seek approval from CSREC
for the more human-facing aspects of the project. We completed the CSREC
paperwork, including the AWERB paperwork as an appendix alongside a Data
Management Plan, draft Cat Welfare Protocol, and our communications strategy.
CSREC’s initial feedback requested further detail about the design of
interviews and surveys, and procedures to protect people’s identities in
social media posts; and asked for clarification about the ongoing involvement
of cat welfare experts (including their presence onsite) and various details
around the involvement of the cats and operation of the robot. Their feedback
also highlighted potential reputational risks to the University and the wider
Trustworthy Autonomous Systems research community, especially around potential
negative public and media reaction to the AI aspects of the project, with an
explicit request that “the study team reflect on the potential relationship
between negative responses to the project and the project’s own framing”. They
observed that: “It is possible that any media/protest group attention might
expand outwards from the welfare of the individual cats into discussions
around AI being forced onto animals without their consent (and humans are
next)”, further observing that “… media presentations around AI often fall
into extremes of either utopia or dystopia, which prevent much nuanced
discussion occurring and can cause discussion to be polarised”.

These comments revealed the need for clearer communication of the artistic
framing of the project, especially with regard to the balance between
benefiting cats versus provoking questions in humans. In response, we wrote a
document explaining how the artistic framing of a ‘cat utopia’ involved a
deliberate use of ambiguity to provoke people to reflect on wider implications
of AI, and how this built on a history, within both art and HCI, of harnessing
ambiguity (including the deliberate use of over-precision (citing (Gaver et
al., 2003)). However, we also recognised that there should be no ambiguity
about our position with regards to the cats: that we should better communicate
how we were focused on trying to provide them with the most positive enriching
play experience we could, while meeting their welfare needs.

CSREC was sufficiently satisfied with our response to be able to grant
approval for the human-facing aspects of the project. However, it expressed
concern that there were still unresolved issues around the treatment of the
cats and the potential for wider risk to the University beyond its remit. At
this point discussions progressed to a Science Faculty level where it was
decided to seek a further round of approval from an additional committee.

###  4.4. Discussions with the Committee for Animals and Research Ethics
(CARE)

Our engagement with the CARE in the Veterinary School occurred in the final
month of project development and so presented an opportunity to review our
design in its final form after several iterations of testing and development
had occurred. Our submission to CARE included a Cat Welfare Protocol that set
out procedures to be followed to ensure the welfare of the cats. Much of
CARE’s feedback focused on this, with requests to clarify aspects such as
providing a suitably long habituation period, whether the cats would also be
monitored when outside of the enclosure and in their living quarters within
the art studio, whether they were already part of a social group, assessment
scales to be used, and the level of experience or training of the Cat Welfare
Officer. These issues were relatively easy to accommodate in the final
protocol.

A more challenging issue (that had been present since our early internal
discussions) concerned the cats’ autonomy, especially their ability to
withdraw from the enclosure. It was clear to all that the cats should be
promptly removed from the enclosure if showing any signs of fear or stress.
Less clear was what should happen if they appeared to be bored by the
robot/enclosure and more interested in what was happening outside. Should they
be able to leave the enclosure at will via a cat door? Given safety concerns
about the environment immediately beyond the enclosure (narrow, dark, full of
cables and computers, and with a door to the wider world that might be left
open for ventilation), but also a desire to keep the artwork running whenever
reasonable, it was decided, after considerable discussion, that the door to
the enclosure would be closed when the cats were inside, that this would only
be for 3 hour stretches, and that the Cat Welfare Officer and/or owner would
be able to instigate removal of the cats if deemed important for their
welfare.

Like AWERB before, CARE was also concerned about the validy of our methods and
the generality of the knowledge they would produce; specifically that the
project might be seen by the public and by other scientists as an attempt to
undertake scientific experiments into animal behaviour. The committee
requested that the project should be portrayed as a “one-off exercise and that
the behaviour recorded cannot be generalised to other cats, single cats, other
breeds, other social groups”. We subsequently coordinated with CARE to agree
the final wording on the project website and in press releases.

##  5\. Discussion: Revealing Ethical Tensions

We identify three broad reasons why Cat Royale needed to navigate such a
complex ethical review process. First, it was a complex project involving many
moving parts — animal, human and robot — and so needed to draw on varied
expertise to surface and resolve diverse ethical challenges. Second, its
iterative design-led approach required a similarly iterative ethical process
that moved from surfacing broad concerns to ultimately shaping and approving
fine details (reflecting Munteanu et al.’s (Munteanu et al., 2015) and Brown
et al.’s (Brown et al., 2016) previous observations concerning the dynamic
nature of HCI research in relation to ethical review). Third, the ethical
review process had to negotiate underlying differences between the diverse
disciplines that became involved. These differences were foundational to how
different parties approached the process. They were also largely hidden,
arising from assumptions about how research should be done and/or how others
might view research as described. This leads us to propose a framework to help
make explicit the disciplinary landscape within which complex multi-
disciplinary and multispecies research projects must negotiate ethics.

###  5.1. Beneficiary-epistemology space

We define this landscape through two orthogonal dimensions that, on
reflection, we realise underpinned the many ethical discussions we were
having.

Beneficiaries – considers who benefits from the research and correspondingly
who does not, including who assumes the risks of potential harms; in other
words, anyone who could be regarded as a stakeholder. We divide beneficiaries
into human and animal. Human stakeholders may span research participants
(e.g., the cats’ owner), target end users (e.g., the public audience), but
also many others with a stake in the project (e.g., the artists, University
researchers and their academic colleagues). Similarly, animal stakeholders may
include those directly involved in research activities, those targeted by the
research, and others in the wider ecosystem. The most challenging ethical
tensions typically arise when those who might potentially be harmed are not
the same as those who might benefit, especially if they are unable to consent
or effectively dissent.

Epistemology – considers what different disciplines regard as valid knowledge
and methods for attaining it. With regards to multidisciplinary research, Moon
et al. (Moon et al., 2021) discuss how epistemologies may be broadly situated
between two opposing poles: on the one hand,positivism/objectivism emphasises
objective knowledge gained by observation and validated by experimentation; on
the other hand, interpretivism/subjectivism emphasises that the beliefs of
individuals or communities constitute legitimate knowledges, and that
researchers are inherently part of the research and so can never be objective.
As the authors highlight, tensions are likely to arise when research involves
multidisciplinary contributors who subscribe to different epistemologies and,
thus, different beliefs as to what constitutes knowledge and how knowledge is
developed.

Against these two dimensions important tensions pertaining to ethical review
become apparent. Figure two shows the beneficiary-epistemology space of Cat
Royale, populated (to a first approximation) with the project (yellow box),
our three ethical IRBs (green), and important tendencies within the underlying
disciplines that they serve (blue labels).

Figure 2. Beneficiary-epistemology space reveals the disciplinary alignment of
Cat Royale and its three IRBs and hence the tensions in its ethical review
process.

A diagram in the form of a two dimensional taxonomy. The horizontal dimension
is labelled beneficiaries, and runs from humans on the left to animals on the
right. The vertical dimension is labelled epistemology, and runs from
positivism and objectivism at the bottom to interpretivism and subjectivism at
the top. Across the top half of the diagram is a shaded area representing the
Cat Royale project. At the top left and so overlapping with this, is a smaller
area labelled as the Computer Science Research Ethics Committee. At the bottom
left, is an area labelled Animal Welfare and Ethical Review Body. At the
bottom right, is an area labelled Committee for Animal Research Ethics. There
is a label bottom left saying medical Science. There is a label bottom right
saying Veterinary Science. There is a label middle top saying Design-led
Human-Computer Interaction. A line on the diagram show an internal tension
within the project and two further lines show external tensions between the
project and external review boards. There is a labelled arrow to show how the
Participation in Play Scale and Cat Stress Scale method were imported from
Veterinary Science into the project.

We position Cat Royale as spanning the top-half of the space. The project
intended to directly benefit both humans (the public audience) and non-humans
(the cats), albeit in quite different ways; the former through encouragement
to reflect on AI and the latter through a positive play experience. It also
involved other human stakeholders who stood to benefit and/or carried risk,
including the artists, cats’ owner, robot operators and wranglers, and the
wider research team. Adopting a very broad view of the surrounding ecosystem,
animal stakeholders included the three cats, but potentially also their
siblings (who did not participate and were temporarily deprived of their
company) and even the artists’ dog (who was banned from the studio space for
the duration). Turning to epistemology, Cat Royale followed an interpretivist
and subjectivist design-led approach consistent with Research Through Design.
However, as we discuss further below, it actually combined two distinct
methods that were themselves in tension, artist-led research and co-design
with animals. And while it did not claim to ‘do science’, it clearly imported
methods from Veterinary Science in the form of the Participation in Play Scale
and the Cat Stress Scale which it applied for its own purposes.

We also position our three IRBs within this space. CSREC routinely deals with
research involving human participants, which is expected to benefit humans.
They are experienced in assessing design-led HCI research, including artist-
led and co-design projects, but did not have experience of projects involving
animals. CARE deals specifically with veterinary research, which typically
aims to benefit animals and employs scientific methods. AWERB has a broad
remit concerned with the welfare of any animals used for any research across
the University and implements a legally mandated regulatory function. Although
this applies to any research involving animals, it is rooted in the use and
protection of animals predominantly in medical research, which typically
applies scientific methods for human benefit and in which animals are
instruments in the scientific apparatus. Both CARE and AWERB primarily
consider the integrity of scientific processes when judging the balance of
benefits and risks to either humans or animals, and compliance with
legislation. They are less familiar with the design-led, reflective, and
human- and animal-centred research approaches common in HCI and ACI.

Finally, we also label some broader underlying disciplinary trends on the
landscape. Veterinary Science leans towards research that often benefits
animals (though it does not necessarily benefit research subjects and may
ultimately benefit humans, if we consider animal farming or owning pets) and
that critically employs scientific methods. Medical Science leans towards
research that benefits humans (often at the cost of harming animals) and that
also typically employs scientific methods. HCI traditionally seeks to benefit
humans and is epistemologically broad, with foundations in the science of
experimental psychology, but with later ‘waves’ turning towards interpretivist
and subjectivist epistemology. The design-led HCI approach that we were
following appears in the top half of the space. ACI aims to benefit animals
(both research participants and end users) and, like HCI, draws on a range of
methods, including those derived from the experimental tradition of Veterinary
Science and from HCI’s design-led approaches. This is, of course, a simplified
portrayal of what are complex disciplines that may themselves accommodate
multiple epistemological stances and related methodological approaches. As
mentioned above, HCI research can involve scientific methods such as lab-based
experimentation. Medical and Veterinary research may accommodate perspectives
from the social sciences, humanities and even the arts (e.g., in Health
Humanities and Veterinary Humanities). However, we maintain that our
observations highlight significant general orientations in these various
disciplines that are useful for anticipating their ethical perspectives.

Positioning the project, ethical IRBs and underlying disciplines within
beneficiary-epistemology space in this way, serves to reveal key tensions that
had to be negotiated throughout the ethical review process.

###  5.2. Internal tensions within Cat Royale

First, we recognise that the project negotiated significant internal tensions.
Previous discussions in HCI have considered the complexities that arise from
overlapping ethical frames that blur the relationship between art and research
and this was also the case here. The overarching (or outer) framing of the
project was to benefit humans by employing artist-led methods to provoke
audiences to reflect on trust in autonomous systems. However, this was to be
achieved through a distinct inner framing that involved applying animal-
centred co-design to enable a robot to play with cats. These partially
overlapping ethical frames raised confusion during ethical review. The idea of
provoking audiences to reflect on trust in robots and AI implied that there
might potentially be some risk to the cats, at least in theory. Would the
artists need to create or at least imply situations that raised a degree of
uncertainty about risks to the cats? Might it appear that the cats were being
exploited for the purposes of art or even base entertainment, as if within
some kind of circus?

This was exacerbated by methodological differences wthin the project. While
both Performance-led Research (Benford et al., 2013, 2015) and Participatory
ACI (Westerlaken and Gualeni, 2016; Mancini and Lehtonen, 2018a; Chisik and
Mancini, 2020) are design-oriented methods that share a common underlying
subjectivist/interpretivist epistemology, there are important differences
between them. Artist-led design relies on the professional judgement of
artists to make appropriate ethical choices and carefully judge boundaries
(Benford et al., 2015). Their artworks may be transgressive, sometimes pushing
personal boundaries, making their ability to judge whether participants
consent to or wish to withdraw of paramount importance. Judging the cat’s
boundaries in this respect was a new and difficult challenge for the artists,
requiring input from animal welfare experts and the cats’ human owner.
Conversely, ACI’s approach of co-designing with animals considers them to be
partners in a co-design process, notwithstanding contextual limitations and
exclusions. The ACI ethics frame required that their autonomy be prioritised
to enable them to provide or withdraw contingent consent to their involvement
and, thus inform the design of future cat-robot interaction experiences
(Mancini and Nannoni, 2022). However, allowing the cats to exit the enclosure
at will could have endangered them; since according to ACI research ethics
threats to animals’ physical and psychological integrity must be avoided at
all costs (Mancini, 2017), there was a case for prioritising the cats’ safety
over their autonomy. Moreover, the cats’ exit would have effectively put an
end to the aesthetic experience of the audience, thereby defeating the
project’s artistic goals. At the same time, it was important that the audience
could focus on the aesthetic experience and the questions this provoked,
without being distracted by concerns over the situation of the individual
cats. These contextual demands and the resulting constraints inevitably
excluded possibilities (Giraud, 2019) for the cats’ agency (e.g. what they
might have expressed had they been able to enter and exit the enclosure at
will), but at the same time it was only through these limitations that the
cats could be given representation and agency within the project and, thus,
the possibility to influence its outcomes (Mancini and Lehtonen, 2018b) and
the future of technology that might impact them, the species they represented
and other animals.

While understandably challenging for ethical review, the deliberately
ambiguous framing of the work and clash of methods were core to the artistic
proposition that, through a sincere and comprehensive attempt to design a
robot to benefit cats, the artists could simultaneously surface deeper issues
about the role of AI in society. However, it did require us to write a
document that carefully articulated this proposition for our IRBs.

###  5.3. The external tension with Veterinary Science

Our project aspired to have a productive relationship with Veterinary Science.
We were keen to draw on expert advice on cat welfare and behaviour, make use
of tools such as the Participation in Play and Cat Stress Scale, and even
hoped that our research findings might be of wider interest to their
community. However, while we shared a common interest in the cats as
beneficiaries, there was confusion about our approach. Why make an artwork
rather than undertake a series of lab experiments?

Underlying this were epistemological differences between our design-led
approach to ACI and the desire for the replicability of research protocols and
generalisability of findings from Veterinary Science. This became evident in
our struggles to clarify hypotheses and data collection methods, and
ultimately the requirement for us to publicly clarify that this was a one-off
artwork, not a repeatable experiment. With hindsight, this is understandable.
While we were aspiring to benefit cats, we did not subscribe to the widely
accepted positivist epistemology or apply methods recognised by this
community. Thus, even if we did not actually harm the cats, it was not clear
on what objective grounds we could justifiably claim to benefit them or cats
in general.

To further confuse matters, we were evidently trying to apply techniques
developed within Veterinary Science, but potentially in an unprincipled way
that might be seen as bogus science, something that could be questioned by the
wider scientific community. This reflects HCI’s previous discussions of the
challenges that arise concerning ‘veracity’ when artists engage with science,
for example, when presenting themselves as scientists within an artwork
(Benford et al., 2015).

Given that this was intended to be a very public project and so would likely
attract widespread scrutiny (including from other veterinary scientists),
there was a risk to the University’s wider reputation for veterinary science.
In the worst case, were serious incidents to occur (e.g., if the cats were to
have been harmed somehow), the resulting furore could impact the ability of
the University’s veterinary science community to conduct their own research in
the future. It is not difficult to imagine (though no one said so) how we
might appear to be ‘tourists’, visiting another discipline, taking away some
‘souvenirs’ (methods), and potentially leaving a trail of damage in our wake,
while we quickly moved on to new destinations. Indeed, this is perhaps a wider
consideration for a field such as HCI that routinely turns to other
disciplines for inspiration and knowledge, whose methods it may then
appropriate for its own purposes. Ultimately, this tension was resolved
through a dialogue with CARE that led to a clearer internal and public
recognition of epistemological differences, and through the recruitment of a
recognised veterinary researcher and their expertise in cat behaviour, who
would be able to advise on the project.

###  5.4. The external tension with Medical Science

At first sight Cat Royale might appear to be far removed from medical science.
However, we were aware of potential confusions here that we wished to avoid.
First, we recognised a potential reading of the project that we might be
seeking to experiment on animals (at some risk to them) in the interest of
benefiting humans (even if not medically). Second, while AWREB does not
exclusively deal with the use of animals in medical research, its remit
includes ensuring compliance with relevant legislation that does arise from
this, especially with the principles of the 3Rs, which is regarded as
insufficient by ACI ethical standards (Mancini, 2017). Moreover, medical
research is largely grounded in a positivist scientific epistemology, so that
there were potential tensions around both beneficiaries and epistemology.

In contrast to our engagement with Veterinary Science, this was not a
disciplinary relationship that we sought but, rather, it was one that we
needed to anticipate and avoid. We did not wish to borrow from or do medical
research but needed to manage the risk that we might be viewed by the public
as though we were experimenting on animals or be judged in this way during the
ethical approval process. That is, we needed to show how our proposed research
fundamentally differed from the medical model by clearly articulating how a
project such as Cat Royale could potentially benefit both humans and animals
in different ways, without using animals as research instruments but rather
involving them as research participants, who would be protected to the same
extent as human participants might be protected in medical research (Mancini
and Nannoni, 2022).

###  5.5. Wider reflections on risks and benefits

We reflect that, in negotiating these three tensions, it often appeared easier
to identify and mitigate potential harms than it was to articulate benefits.
The ethical process identified many risks of harm including stress and injury
to the cats, reputational risks to the University and individual researchers
being exposed to potentially hostile social media. Once clearly identified,
however, these were then possible to mitigate (at least given appropriate
external advice), for example, by planning a wide range of measures to ensure
the comfort and safety of the cats, or by delegating media relations to the
artists and senior members of the research team who had undertaken media
training. In contrast, articulating potential benefits to balance potential
harms proved far more difficult, as evidenced by the extensive dialogue with
both CARE and AWERB about there being no clear experimental design,
insufficient clarity over data collection and a lack of reusable results. Such
discussions relate to the assumed validity of the research, and the knowledge
developed through it, and ultimately speak to whether the research might
deliver valuable benefits or might even be seen as dangerously bogus.

The difficulty of demonstrating the benefits of using animals in research
relative to the ease of identifying harms is well-known and has been
highlighted by policy advisory working groups, such as the American
Association for Laboratory Animal Science–Federation of European Laboratory
Animal Science Associations, in short AALAS–FELASA (Laber et al., 2016). This
is because, in much animal research (e.g. medical research, toxicology
studies), the harms inflicted on animals are both certain and immediate,
whilst the benefits to society are uncertain and may only manifest in the long
term (especially in the case of fundamental research). Thus, to justify the
use of animals, researchers must demonstrate that the work they propose to do
can yield valid knowledge and, as discussed previously, scientific knowledge
is regarded as the gold standard. In contrast, in research that conforms to
animal-centred principles, as in ACI, knowingly harming animals is simply not
permitted, regardless of what kind of knowledge a study might yield. This does
not necessarily mean that animals might not be harmed during a project, but
any harms would occur only if researchers unintentionally failed to predict
and mitigate their possible occurrence. At the same time, other forms of
knowledge might be regarded as valid and worth negligent risks to the animals
involved, provided any risks were properly assessed and duly mitigated.
However, what might be argued as benefits from an ACI perspective, might be
regarded as insufficient from a scientific perspective. In other words, being
able to claim benefits, and thus what risks are worth taking to deliver those
benefits, is fundamentally dependent on specific epistemological perspectives
and on related perceptions of what constitutes valid and legitimate knowledge.
Without explicitly acknowledging, addressing and resolving epistemological
tensions arising within a research project, it may be difficult to convince
ethical IRBs of sufficient benefits, even when risks can be anticipated and
mitigated.

A second reflection concerns reputational risk. Our IRBs explicitly raised
this alongside ethical considerations of the welfare of the cats and human
audience. In contrast to previous arguments that reputational risk can be a
‘serendipitous device’ to constrain academic freedom (Librett and Perrone,
2010), our experience was that our IRBs were not seeking to close down the
project, but rather were helping us anticipate and manage reputational risks
to all concerned, including ourselves, while also requesting that the
University be kept in the picture. Discussions of reputational risk sensitised
us to potential harms to our team members of unwitting exposure to public
backlash (a particular sensitivity for animal research) and enabled us to
anticipate various possibilities when drawing up our communications strategy.
We also came to appreciate the risk that a naïve engagement with the
complexities of animal research might potentially impact on our colleagues’
freedom to conduct their own research, both in the veterinary science and
autonomous systems communities. We therefore concur with Stark’s call for
greater dialogue and mutual understanding (Stark, 2007). In general, we found
the face-to-face discussions with IRBs to be extremely helpful, though
recognise that they need to be carefully managed in a positive spirit. We also
agree with Martin and Inwood in calling for more open recognition of the
subjectivities involved (Martin and Inwood, 2012), and offer beneficiary-
epistemology space as a mechanism for making them visible, especially when
multiple IRBs are involved.

Finally, we reflect on whether any ethical perspectives were missing from the
process. One possibility is a perspective from the arts and humanities that
might have informed discussions of artistic and aesthetic concerns. Such
matters were not within the scope of AWERB and CARE, and while CS-REC did have
experience of considering art as a method in HCI, its expertise did not cover
aesthetic matters. Stronger arts and humanities expertise might have surfaced
ethical issues that were not to the foreground in our interactions with the
three IRBs. A notable example was the artistic reasoning for choosing to work
with cats as noted earlier. Looking back, our ethics paperwork focused on the
practical reasons for choosing cats, but did not speak to our artistic
motivation; that their perceived combination of cuteness and autonomy might
set up an uncomfortable tension in the audience. We did not offer this
artistic rationale to the IRBs, thinking it was outside their scope or perhaps
fearing it would add confusion to an already complicated discussion.
Understandably, they did not raise it themselves. Yet, in hindsight, it
perhaps sat in the background as an uncomfortable feeling for our IRBs (as
well as for the audience) that coloured their reaction to the project.
Introducing additional arts and humanities expertise might have helped clarify
such aesthetic choices.

##  6\. Implications for Future Ethical Review Process

We now consider how future projects could benefit from our reflections on Cat
Royale and the idea of beneficiary-epistemology space.

###  6.1. Supporting explicit ethical framing of projects from the outset

The most immediate use of beneficiary-epistemology space could be for
researchers to carefully position their own HCI/ACI projects alongside their
relevant local ethical IRBs. ACI projects that consider animals as their
intended beneficiaries could also consider risks and benefits to humans who
are likely to be implicated (e.g., owners, animal professionals, strangers who
encounter them, the researchers themselves). HCI projects that intend to
benefit humans could also consider risks and benefits to animals wherever they
live, whether within homes, on farms, or in the wild. Many organisations will
likely have specific ethical and regulatory requirements for research
involving animals and complying with these will often involve dealing with
IRBs whose primary remit lies outside of HCI/ACI and who may not even be
familiar with these fields.

Locating themselves, their local IRBs, their methods and wider contributing
disciplines within beneficiary-epistemology space may help projects identify
underlying tensions that are likely to emerge during the ethical review
process when the project may be reviewed by assessors from different
disciplinary backgrounds. A key lesson from our experience is that researchers
should consider how they are appropriating knowledge and methods from other
disciplines and whether this poses risks to researchers from these wider
communities. Conversely, they might consider any potential benefits to these
communities and what kinds of evidence would be seen as being convincing to
them.

###  6.2. Securing expertise including in Project Ethical Advisory Panels

A second strategy for improving the ethical review process, reflecting calls
for greater dialogue with IRBs (Munteanu et al., 2015; Stark, 2007), is to
involve experts who can help transfer knowledge, negotiate differences and
build confidence, by bringing their specialist expertise into the project and
bridging the different disciplines involved, using beneficiary-epistemology
space to facilitate dialogue. Each project might establish a dedicated Ethical
Advisory Panel at the beginning of the research design process comprising
stakeholders, whose academic expertise might inform the formulation of
proposed research questions and methods; these might include, for example,
computer scientists, designers, artists, and animal researchers. Such panels
might also involve stakeholders who represent the intended beneficiaries of
the proposed research or who are likely to be affected by it (as did the
Audience Advisory Panel for Cat Royale); these might include, for example,
members of the public, animal guardians, animal welfare organisations, and
possibly also animal justice advocates (animal representatives whose role
would be to ensure that issues of animal justice are also considered (Mancini
and Nannoni, 2022)). Additionally, such boards might involve members of the
relevant institutional ethical IRBs, who would be willing to participate in
the research design process, thus representing the perspective of the relevant
disciplines (formalising the kind of advice we informally received in Cat
Royale). To avoid conflicts of interest, any members of ethical IRBs who
participate in the research design process for a project would then be
excluded from its ethical review process.

###  6.3. Establishing HCI-ACI Ethical IRBs

The third longer-term strategy we propose is to reshape IRBs. Ideally, given a
growth in demand, research institutions would establish dedicated HCI-ACI
Ethical IRBs to assess projects at the intersection of HCI and ACI, which
could perhaps include selected members of existing ethical IRBs and which
would cover multidisciplinary epistemological, methodological and ethical
perspectives. HCI-ACI ERB members would be familiar with both HCI’s and ACI’s
epistemological bases, their ethical values and their consequent
methodological demands, and how these require the protection of both humans
and animals from any harm, thus providing a basis for assessing and managing
risks. On the one hand, awareness of the value that the welfare and autonomy
of both humans and animals involved in research must be protected would
provide the bounds within which methodological flexibility can be exercised
with minimal risks. On the other hand, appreciation of the value of different
epistemologies would open the methodological horizon to the diverse benefits
that integrating different knowledges could yield.

##  7\. Conclusions

Designing multispecies computing systems requires the integration of
multidisciplinary expertise, including in the process of ethical review. This
means that researchers need to be open to the epistemological and ethical
perspectives of diverse disciplines, including those with which HCI and ACI’s
ethical values may be in tension. As a complex project to design a computing
system to benefit cats while also provoking humans to reflect on wider
questions of trust in AI, Cat Royale undertook a complex journey through
ethical review that involved constructive dialogue with three distinct IRBs.
With hindsight, this was a powerful probe for exploring the diverse
perspectives involved and consequent tensions that needed to be negotiated. We
found the framework of beneficiary-epistemology space to be useful for
revealing and better understanding our own internal and external tensions, and
suggest that it could guide other projects and IRBs in the future as they
negotiate the complexities of ACI research. We also recognise the possibility
of extending our framework to consider the ethical involvement of other non-
human stakeholders beyond animals, for example, considering plants and wider
environmental impacts, which might also require ethical discussions with other
disciplines. It is interesting to speculate whether, in some long term future,
Artificial Intelligences might ever be warranted ethical consideration as non-
human stakeholders. For the present, we close with some final reflections that
look beyond our particular focus on multispecies interactions to HCI more
widely.

We wholeheartedly agree with those who have called for greater reflection on
and discussion of ethical process within our field. Our experience reveals
that it can be an extremely complex matter, especially for interdisciplinary
projects. We agree with Munteanu et al. (2015), Brown et al. (2016), and
Benford et al. (2015), that HCI’s ethical process needs to be more responsive
and dynamic, involving ongoing dialogue with IRBs, greater researcher
responsibility on the ground, and doing ethics ‘on the way out’, rather than
signing off a rigid protocol at the start. However, the process will be
improved by researchers having a map to guide them along their way; this is
where we suggest that leveraging beneficiary-epistemology space can
contribute.

We also sympathise with those who, from a humanities and social sciences
perspective, warn about the dangers of HCI (and other fields) simply
inheriting the medical model of ethics, given that this is so well established
within institutions. However, it is important to bear in mind that HCI is a
broad interdisciplinary endeavour engaging with diverse communities, some of
which do require tight legal regulation of research (as with animal-research).

We further emphasise that engaging with other disciplines is not a one-way
street. There may be a danger to HCI or ACI researchers in being seen to
appropriate other disciplines’ ideas and methods while disregarding aspects of
their epistemological values and ethical processes. Similarly, there may be a
danger to those communities in being seen as allowing their disciplinary
standards to be compromised. If we wish to involve other researchers into our
projects, then we need to account for their ethical concerns and underlying
epistemologies. If we do not, we risk becoming ‘research tourists’!

Finally, we wonder about the ethics of such ethical reflections. We did not
set out to write a paper on ethical review process at the start of our project
and our ethical discussions with IRBs did not cover this eventuality. We did
consult with our IRBs who saw various drafts of this paper. However, we feel a
need for greater discussion within HCI and with IRBs and other stakeholders
regarding how we can best undertake to reflect on ethical process in a way
that is beneficial to all.

###### Acknowledgements.

We gratefully acknowledge support from the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems
Hub (Grant EP/V00784X/1) and the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in
Horizon: Creating Our Lives in Data (Grant EP/S023305/1). We are also very
grateful for the time taken by the AWERB, CSREC and CARE IRBs to review and
shape our project, and to the many others who contributed including Professor
Daniel Mills of Lincoln University, the Royal Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), and the members of our Audience Advisory Panel.
And of course, special thanks also to Clover, Pumpkin, Ghostbuster, and Ed.

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