Industrial design
bark 1 - A smart AI Dog Collar
Year
2024
Client
Cadence Labs
Timeframe
3 weeks
Status
Concept
World's first emotionally intelligent companion, a wearable that listens to what your dog cannot say and turns the distance between two species into understanding.
Challenge
Between an owner and their dog sits a quiet distance, a gap between what the dog expresses and what the dog actually feels. Dogs move through anxiety, stress, and unease that often goes unsensed especially for those who have come through pet care and rehabilitation. As for owner, they can only read this from the outside and and are mostly guessing, making care, and wellness of their pets a challenge.
Insight
In-depth interviews, user research, market scans, and product teardowns all converged on a single insight: a dog's wellbeing is far more emotional than it is technical, and that emotional dimension had been left undesigned in the market today that is flooded with trackers measuring steps, distance, heartrate and more.
Intent
The work on Bark 1 started with a series of conversations with the founders , listening closely to what they were trying to build and what problem they felt was going unsolved. What became clear from mapping the market was that none had been designed for the dog's inner life. That gap is the story of Bark 1. Not a smarter tracker. A collar that listens, and for the first time, truly understand.
Development
The internal architecture came first: studying current tech stack, variations were positioned across weight, volume, size, shape, and module layout to find what was buildable and where the advantage lay, down to whether splitting the PCBs left and right improved sensing fidelity and what that traded off in cost. Bark was measured against a single question that decided the form, namely whether it makes the dog appear controlled or free; since collars read as symbols of freedom, luxury, and aesthetics, the design moved deliberately toward freeing rather than locking.
