When I read this paper, I couldn’t help but think of the infinite monkey theorem: an army of monkeys hunched over typewriters. But the question the authors investigate is not the probability of a Shakespearean oeuvre as an outcome, but the suitability of human-centric interaction methods for nonhuman users--in this case, orangutans. Modern apes, of course, won’t use typewriters--they prefer playing games over tedious text entry.

In their paper, Wirman and Jørgensen investigate the notion of “intuitive use” for animal-computer interaction that relies on the transfer of knowledge from other domains to the target task. The scenario is to enrich the lives of illegally traded animals held in rescue centers by engaging them in digital games, primarily for the sake of pleasure. While animals have been taught to interact with touch-based devices, the researchers focused on tangible user interfaces, where everyday physical objects offer affordances that invite essential interaction activities for a given context. This way, the mapping in the interaction space between user and task environment reduces the gap between the intended outcome and the actions enabled by the interaction elements. If this gap is so small that users can overcome it on their own, intuitive interaction can be achieved.

One game under development for orangutans builds on the utilization of sticks to poke around in holes, mapping this familiar activity onto the creation of sounds.

While I was somewhat disappointed by the lack of actual implementations and experiments, the paper offers an excellent entry point into the challenges of designing interfaces for nonhuman users. And my mental image of monkeys with typewriters has been supplanted by orangutans poking sticks through a hole in a wood panel to create sounds. But the infinite monkey theorem probably still holds: given an infinite amount of time, an orangutan with a poke stick would almost certainly produce a top-ten tune.