Pets are the source of happiness and cure for modern people. Designing for pets has gradually become one of the most concerned topics in colleges and design markets. When many students majoring in interaction and product create, they first think of human beings as the audience. In fact, pets also have deep emotional links with us, and there are many real life needs. As long as you observe carefully, you can find inspirations. Next, we will combine some student cases to analyze how to include pets in art collection creation, and enlarge the "cute point" to impress the admissions officer by combining professionalism!

How can pets add points to art collection creation?

01. People oriented

That is to say, no matter what products we design, users are the core of our creation. Users can be people or animals from different groups. Only by conducting all-round research around users' needs, preferences, habits, and purposes, can we derive solutions to problems and form a complete and reasonable project background.

Ruoyu's work collection of Parsons offer - themed with pet hospital

However, research is also one of the most difficult aspects of pet design. In the past, we can directly use question and answer communication to obtain first-hand information for different groups of people, but animals can't speak. We judge their needs mostly from the perspective of "master" and "feces removal officer". The information obtained in this way is usually subjective and lacks universality.

Therefore, we suggest that students who choose to design with pets as the protagonist should try to have a real contact with them for a period of time, rather than "cloud sucking cat/dog" to get a rough inspiration and start to create.

The right way to do research is to observe and get along with them, understand their life habits, pay attention to their real physical or psychological needs, investigate products that have not been involved in the market or need to be optimized, and then launch a series of discussions.

02. Cute ≠ younger

When students choose pet topics, they are always attracted by their soft and cute appearance. Most of the keywords they think of are cute. Then they focus on the advantages and characteristics of their image and make great efforts in visual design.

However, in fact, such expressions often seem too "cute" or tend to be younger, and this kind of loveliness is not an advantage in the creation of works collection for the purpose of professional competence assessment, but may lead to our theme not being thick enough, and there is no core worthy of in-depth consideration.

Secondly, the theme of the works collection will make people have too cute comments. Most of the contents also focus on the physiological needs or wearable decorations of pets, which is, in general, eating, drinking, pulling and sleeping. But in fact, pets, like us humans, also have complex and rich psychological needs.

For the owner, the role of pets is more like friends, relatives, or even the most intimate life partner. From this perspective, we will find more angles that can be extended and implement more in-depth topics.

Yuan, a student who has received an offer of professional service design from Huangyi Ace, has a set of pet design projects in his work collection, with the theme of "SOUL EGG", which aims to help pet owners like him make up for the grief of losing their pets and realize their dream of never leaving their pets. recommend: What are the suggestions for RCA service design portfolio?

Compared with human beings, the life of pets is very short and can only accompany us for more than ten years. For every pet owner, the arrival of the day of departure is always particularly painful, and the feeling of losing a close friend can only be understood through personal experience.

Starting from his own personal experience, Yuan designed a complete set of interactive works, including mobile applications, pet intelligent devices and intelligent holographic projectors, in the mentality of a owner who hopes to keep his pet around forever.

The product form is to record the movement, life, activities, calls and other data of pets while they are alive through smart collars, and upload them to the cloud platform uniformly. After a series of intelligent processing, digital images can also be formed after the death of pets. Simulate the living state of pets to help users continue to interact with their pets.

　　03、5W+H

Every mature product/interaction design should stand the scrutiny of multiple dimensions, and according to the design process, there is also an invariable rule, that is, the "5W+H" familiar to industry insiders:

WHO - who uses

WHERE - Where to use

WHAT - What to use

WHY - Why

WHEN - When to use

HOW - How to use

When we design products with pets as the theme, we should also consider the needs of users from these dimensions, take pets as the product audience, and build the entire design framework based on the emotional links between pets and people or between pets themselves, and comprehensively consider the design elements of time, place, purpose and purpose.

Both humans and animals are perceptual creatures, and the interaction between humans and animals is also full of uncertainty. Only by perceiving life personally and finding the entry point from the details of life that we are most accustomed to, can we make design works that are truly reasonable and unexpected.

Harvest CMU Carnegie Mellon University The student source students of the four offers, her design perspective is more focused on the interaction and psychological needs between pets. She has built a social platform for pets for dating purposes, called "Let your pet date today!"

Through her daily life with pets, Yuan found that pets not only need to get along with their owners, but also need to socialize with their peers on a daily basis. However, due to the lifestyle of contemporary people, their loneliness is becoming increasingly serious. Therefore, she wants to design a mobile phone software to solve the problem of making friends with pets.

After detailed research and data collection, the source students analyzed their matching criteria rationally from the aspects of animal health, breed, character, behavior, etc., and then recommended the most suitable candidates for users' pets according to big data.

The design focus of this work is to focus on the social needs of pets, build a solid research framework through the 5W+H design process, and combine interesting interactive forms to achieve. The various business models conceived around the product are very mature and can withstand scrutiny.

5W+H is also applicable to any theme of product creation mode, helping us find the right entry point and the most social depth of the design direction.

It is not uncommon to design products or interactive works for animals as topics closely related to our daily life. There are also some mature interactive products and wearable intelligent devices for pets in the domestic and international commercial markets.

Today, with the rapid development of information technology, the application of science and technology can not only bring changes to our daily life, but also help animals to obtain more comfortable life experience, and improve the relationship and interaction mode between us and animals. These angles can be the design points that students seek inspiration and actively explore in life, so that pets can add highlights to the creation of works together with you!

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