Everyday things would be different. You have to account for tails everywhere. Bandaids wouldn’t work with fur. Would shirts be worn, or would natural fur coats be all that is there? Food workers would have full body nets. Claw tips come out of a different area and would make some tasks that use fingertips difficult (typing)…
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I think Band-Aids would still be a thing; we would just have to shave the area before applying them.
Not sure if clothing would be for more than just fashion. I suppose people could still have the same sensibilities about nudeness, even if most species have built in genital coverings.
Make-up might not exist.
Depending on how much variety was in hands, there may be an even larger variety of hand-tool styles.
I would suspect that instead of your traditional bandaid with a sticky side instead a version where you tie it on would become more popular as you wouldn’t have to worry about shaving the area first. I think there would also be more markets that advertise to specific species. As for hygiene I would imagine that grooming products would be very popular as nobody wants to deal with a mouthful of fur or coughing up fur balls. I imagine that touch screens wouldn’t really be all that popular for the reasons that you mentioned and that buttons would be used as pressure sensitive screens could be damaged more easily by claws. I do believe that makeup would still exist, but it would likely be in the form of fur dyes or powder that can be easily washed out, especially since the majority of mammals dont sweat so it smearing would be a lesser concern.
Species would be more geographically separated due to temperature tolerances throughout the year as they would be more likely to live in areas more suitable for them. On a similar aspect, I think they would wear less overall clothing due to fur making it easy to get too hot. Vehicles would likely have taller roofs to account for ears. If the size range on species is large enough I would also imagine that there would be doors within doors or multiple doors of different sizes to allow for smaller species and larger species to be accounted for without making too many modifications to accommodate them.
The whole field of ergonomics would be a lot more interesting. The diversity of body shapes means you don’t just have to account for larger bands of possible dimensions, you may need to account for entirely different anatomy. These would follow through clothing, furniture, construction, accessibility laws, etc. There wouldn’t be just one new shape that’s different to ours, there’d be dozens to account for.
Touching on just construction for a moment, there’s a concept in at least some countries of what can be advertised as livable space, the most clear example being minimum ceiling heights. With a broader array of body shapes, lawmakers have to make a decision between allowing residential buildings to be advertised with a limited category of occupancy (necessitating the creation of several classes of living space with different requirements) or requiring every residential space to be built to at least physically fit every potential resident, no matter who it’s advertised to. Commercial and industrial spaces obviously would all have to fall into that latter category anyway.
Stairs provide a more difficult problem, because you can’t just size them to the largest possible resident, nor the smallest. You could create steps with multiple sizes side-by-side, but that requires more space; I suspect ramps would be far more common than they are in our world as a “one-size-fits-all” solution. Can you imagine a world where everyone expects a ramp up to the second floor of their home before they expect stairs?
A struggle against prejudice and xenophobia on a much greater level than humans have with only one species, debates on whether it’s ethical for a couple to produce an anthro mule or other infertile hybrid, any modern mixed-species regions would need a very complex design to accommodate everyone’s different biological needs even if all the anthros are nearly the same size, the study of evolution would be a lot of fun because a diverse anthro world requires many distinct intelligent species to emerge very close in time to one another, endless other worldbuilding opportunities
Opposable thumbs are kinda important to everything. Climbing, throwing, manipulating. Basically the entire industrial world and all products. I think of my days working at an asphalt plant. No machinery is possible as it is now, cars, driving, maintenance of anything; it all requires thumbs. The extra step of some kind of prosthetic manipulator would make everything prohibitively expensive impractical IMO. It would be a world of cave life without tools and fire.
Assuming we’re talking animal anatomy (and not ‘hands’ on species that normally have paws), all of the jobs and societal roles that require fine manipulation would be limited to a fairly small number of species. Monkeys would likely be very sought after for most of those positions. Rodents would likely be pretty high on the list, too. On the other side of things, canines and felines - despite their popularity - would have the hardest time with things. Never mind things like marine mammals and birds.
Do otters count with marine mammals? Birds are very good at manipulation and some can create some tools. In your description I think that world would have some pretty serious segregation issues.
If we’re going with ferals, very different world, but you do have some with thumbs, bears, rodents… I like this take where a character without hands (a mantis) question how they got their cat friend into the straitjacket. I think you would get industrialization, it would just look different enough we can’t envision it.
I am not into furry stuff (saw this in the New/All feed). However, I am very into AI roleplaying, hard science fiction, and this overall idea of how things might be different under some arbitrary ruleset. IMO, the less that happens “off screen” the more stuff becomes interesting to a wider audience.
I have trouble picturing the fundamentals like machining, welding, foundry work, all the way to maintenance. Like picture yourself changing a flat on a car and trying to replace the wheel with the spare. Ladders in particular would be out. Around the home, it would likely be easier to clean something like a grill you might find in a restaurant’s kitchen than it is to manipulate pots and pans. A joystick might be easier than a steering wheel. Elastic closures on clothing would likely replace buttons, zippers, or lace ups. Those are just a few I can think of off hand.
Off screen is always a cheap excuse, but makes for funny comics.
From your descriptions, it sounds like the creatures in your world are sentient versions of the ones in ours. I think that world would look different in ways we can’t imagine. The analogous technologies would have hundreds of years of development starting from a different baseline. I think there would be a lot more cooperation needed for tasks, and things would be designed with that in mind. Continued development would lead to more automation, like in our reality, but not in a form we are used to. A keyboard wouldn’t work with paws, but that isn’t to say something just as efficient wouldn’t be created as an input method. The whole written language might look different to account for potential writing dexterity limitations. The world would be completely alien.
I have explored a great many ideas that I have not shared here. Things like, I believe the real future is entirely organic compute. All technology will be grown as much as it is made. We currently still exist in the silicon epic of the stone age.
The one aspect I feel really weak on but would love to explore is scientific speculation about evolution of humans in isolated groups and how that might be influenced by environment and current phenotype concentrations over various time frames.
How the Earth will evolve across Milankovitch cycles, and the cataclysmic events that are inevitable across geological time scales are other aspects I would love to explore.
A lot of my interests and curiosities are limited by what I can do with a LLM. I wish I could train AI with more cutting edge realistic options, but the kinds of models that are smart enough to make super compelling stories only barely run on my hardware. These are not accessible for me to train in practice.
As far as your last comment on keyboards, the future is likely going to be your own offline AI assistant doing most of your input/output for you. It will end up feeling like a part of your inner voice. I just hope that is an offline and open source model being used with lots of transparency.
Houses and furniture would come in many different sizes - the “one size fits all” approach that we have now wouldn’t work.
Would this be the zootopia model where its by neighborhood, or more like downsizing with entire small cities for small critters.
Either are fun to think about! I think Beastars did a great job representing this.
