All Dogs Go To Heaven

Spring 2024*

All Dogs Go To Heaven is a project devoted to helping pet owners mitigate grief before, during, and after their pets’ deaths.

*Pratt MID Thesis Project

To begin to understand pet owners, and the high points and low points of dog ownership, 15 self-proclaimed “dog lovers” from varying demographics were interviewed to gain insight.

Preliminary Research

Journey Map: A detailed timeline showing the emotional journey of interviewees throughout their dog’s life.

Interview Results: Despite demographic differences in interviewees, there was a lot of crossover in “pain points”.

Preliminary Sketches

These concept sketches are for a variety of products aimed at mitigating grief in dog owners.

Design Goal: Create a product that an owner can use both during the dog’s life, and after the death of the animal.

Design Goal: Create a product that brings the owner joy, akin to the experience of being with their dog.

Design Goal: Create a product to help an owner track their personal progress throughout their grief cycle.

Design Goal: Create a product that encourages dog owners reach out to either family members or friends throughout the grieving process to gain comfort from others.

3D prototypes were made from initial sketches to test feasibility and then presented to dog owners for feedback on whether they could see themselves using the product to mitigate grief after their pets died.

Preliminary Prototypes

Design Goal: Test the form factor, weight, and scale of the initial sketches as well as gauge feedback from critics.

After ideating on a number of products, and gathering feedback, design direction was changed to a service-based approach.

Secondary Ideation

Design Goal: Reach a wider audience with a service-based approach, rather than designing highly specific products that appeal to individual users.

PupCycle is a 3-part service that helps dog owners before, during, and after the death of their pets. The service is hosted on PupCycle.net.

Creation of PupCycle

Design Goal: Create an engaging, user-friendly website to host the 3 different parts of PupCycle’s service.

The first part of PupCycle is an online page about pet death and grieving, allowing pet owners to access this information at their own pace and make informed decisions about their pets' end-of-life care.

Grief Guide & Death Info

Design Goal: Give dog owners access to more information about their pet’s end-of-life, and what takes place immediately before, during, and after the death.

The second part of PupCycle is a curated marketplace of small-scale artisans, craftspersons, and makers that specialize in custom and personalized goods honoring pets.

Curated Marketplace

Design Goal: Give dog owners access to more information about their pet’s end-of-life, and what takes place immediately before, during, and after the death.

The third part of PupCycle is an upcycling service for no-longer-needed pet goods. Pet owners can choose to donate goods to PupCycle when their pets die so that these items can find a new life in a new home.

UpCycling Service

Design Goal: Reduce waste in the pet industry, and give pet owners a sense of joy in seeing their beloved pet’s things find new life in a new home with another dog.

To test the feasibility of the upcycling service, donations of used pet goods were collected from current and previous pet owners

Repairing Upcycled Goods

Once received, all donated goods, all items were inspected for visible signs of wear and tear.

Goods that were in “like new” condition were washed and branded with the PupCycle logo before being uploaded onto the website for purchase.

Goods that were in “good” condition were washed, repaired as needed, and branded with the PupCycle logo before being uploaded onto the website for purchase.

Goods that were unusable in their current condition were combined with other damaged items to create an original line of goods. Since many of these goods were toys they were branded as “Frankentoys”.