Für Edward
Illustration: Kristina Micotti.
I’m in bed, trying to read, but pat. Edward has other ideas.
Edward is my cat, which is a relationship that comes with an important corollary when considering pets. “If I have a dog, my dog has a human,” writes Donna Haraway in The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, her 2003 book examining connections between species. “[What] that means concretely is at stake.” So, with Haraway’s reflection in mind, let’s try to figure out what Edward and my relationship means at present. I am a human, trying to read; Edward is a cat, trying to stop me reading. Each time I attempt to turn the page: pat. A paw extends, tapping smartly at the curlicue of paper. “We are not one,” Haraway says, “and being depends on getting on together.” Pat.
You can probably tell that Edward and I are not cooperating. The reading is continuing; the paws are growing more insistent. By now, in fact, they’re pressed quite firmly on top of the book, with Edward’s face peeping over the dust jacket. It’s actually quite an expressive tableau, because Edward is quite an expressive cat. He’s absolutely tiny, for instance, but in possession of outsized waggling ears, and huge lamp-like eyes. So, quite a gobliny cat, but still cute, yeah? Meanwhile, he has a mutation in one of the genes that codes his fur, an effect of which is that his hairs have a proclivity towards the dishevelled. Basically, he is genetically rumpled. At the moment, for example, his chest and face are sleek and otter- like, but his back and bum are wild and haystacky. He’s a cat in two halves, but his body has suddenly pulled itself into harmony in order to arch up over my book, whose cover slams down under its new weight of cat. His flecked fur ruffles in delight, and he trills as he marches across the paper, rubbing his face on its sharp corners – Edward has triumphed over literature.
Now that he has my attention, Edward changes tack. He hops down off the mattress, before swinging round to pop his front paws onto the bed frame, his face beginning to winkle under the duvet. “We cannot simply ask animals about what they are thinking or feeling,” writes philosopher Lars Svendsen in Understanding Animals: Philosophy for Dog and Cat Lovers, “and it’s not always easy interpreting their body language.” Hmm, maybe, but then Edward has just trampled Understanding Animals, and it’s pretty clear what he’s after: Edward wants to get into bed. I lift up the duvet to create a tunnel, arching my legs as a buttress, and he slips in. Cue contented purring as he rolls around in the hollow, while I return to Svendsen: “What is it like to be a [cat]?[1] It is a strange question. What is it like to be a human? Are these questions essentially different?” “Miaow,” says Edward, tucked up in bed.
Sharing my flat with a cat entails negotiation, not least because Edward and I have different ideas about what its elements are for. Shelves are not for displaying ornaments, for instance, but for weaving across precariously. Said ornaments, meanwhile, are not for appreciation, but for slowly pushing until they smash to the floor. Their remnants should then be peered at, with any responsibility for their downfall met with wide-eyed incredulity, before another ornament can begin to be slid over the edge to join its fallen comrade. The sofa is for sitting on – here we are in agreement – but also for shredding when you enter the room, whereas bookcases are not for storage, but rather for hiding atop from the hoover (who is, in Edward’s opinion, a known bastard). The table, Edward concedes, is for dining, but ideally you should be sat amongst its plates like a purring pepper pot, your arse slowly reversing into a fellow diner’s face while your nose and mouth determinedly lower into the serving bowl. “Meaning is attributed to the world by the beings that live and act within it,” writes Svendsen. “The world in itself is meaningless, and there is no neutral meaning in the world either because different beings[...] will always project their own meaning onto it.”
“What is it like to be a cat? It is a strange question. What is it like to be a human? Are these questions essentially different?”
Edward and I may be looking at the same things, but we project onto them different meanings. I, for instance, currently see a keyboard, useful for typing this essay, but Edward sees bh2ekr45 `zasq ÛıÌÓ◊ CDFR, which I assume is his way of capturing the fact that a keypad is a warm place to sit the moment I leave the room. What is at play in all of our spatial negotiations is the idea of an umwelt, a term coined by biologist Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll to capture an organism’s subjective reality as governed by their sensory apparatus. “Thus we ultimately reach the conclusion that each subject lives in a world composed of subjective realities alone,” von Uexküll wrote in his 1934 monograph A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men, “and that even the Umwelten themselves represent only subjective realities.” Edward and I may share a physical space, but we do not share an umwelt – which should be clear because I’ve just found him pushing his face into a shoe.
As a result of their umwelten, pets are frequently design resistant – they confound expectations, uncover new affordances in objects, and inadvertently hack spaces and products in manners that humans rarely expect. “It is easy to dismiss the culture of pets as rooted in a human desire for control, namely for a relationship with another being that is entirely on our own terms,” notes architecture writer Paul Dobraszczyk in his 2023 book Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us. “But animals are not merely commodities; they bite back in ways that we cannot usually foresee.” One area in which this becomes apparent, for instance, is the realm of specialist pet products. Over the years Edward has been bought countless cat beds and toys, only to largely ignore them in favour of sitting in the cardboard boxes in which they arrived, or else merrily twanging the loose Sellotape that once secured their packaging. Nevertheless, I keep buying him products because, as Dobraszczyk notes, “[opening] up to animals means de-centring ourselves.”
Now, I know that what I’ve just said is not in the spirit of Dobraszczyk – he’s talking “challenging long-standing anthropocentrism of human thought and ways of being in the world”, I’m talking buying a toy mouse on a string – but shopping for pet products is one way in which I like to imagine that I’m putting Edward first.[2] I buy him products because it feels like I’m doing something for him, which isn’t surprising – there’s a whole industry set up to make people think this way. In their 2023 book Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life, historians Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange set out how the pet industry has “long exploited people’s affection for animals by encouraging them to spend money on pet products,” citing the example of Spillers dog food. In 1919, Spillers launched an advertising campaign that encouraged customers to see their product as more than mere nutrition. Spillers, the campaign suggested, was not simply sustenance, but rather a cooked meat covenant between dog and human, expressing care and affection with every can. “Pet him by all means but make your fondness practical by giving him Spillers Victoria,” the adverts ran, with Hamlett and Strange summarising that dog food was no longer just a functional product, but instead something specifically marketed as “an expression of love”.
Not to disparage Spillers, but I don’t think dog food is an expression of love. More widely, I’m not sure any pet product is an expression of love – at least not without provisos. “If you were to focus on one particular mortal sin within the modern study of animals,” writes Svendsen, “it would be the use of anthropomorphism.” When I shop for Edward outside of bare necessities, I’m not really putting him first – after all, he ignores most of the things I buy him in favour of getting back to his busy schedule of screaming at other cats through the window. Instead, I buy him things because I like to be bought things, and I then carry this element of my experience over to my understanding of his. “The emotional bond between owner and pet is often, perhaps to some degree always, bound up in anthropomorphic projections,” notes anthropologist John Bradshaw in his 2011 book In Defence of Dogs. “Many people appear unthinkingly to treat their animals as if they were little people.” Bradshaw may have a point. I can’t help but notice, for instance, that Edward has barely touched the 31cm-tall soft toy tiger I bought him.[3]
“The emotional bond between owner and pet is often, perhaps to some degree always, bound up in anthropomorphic projections.”
Anthropomorphism, as with many areas of contemporary life, often plays out in relation to pets through the idea of transaction – a predominant mode through which consumer societies seek to express and expand interpersonal relationships. “But I think pets do quite well without all those things,” suggests Sofia Lagerkvist, one of the co-founders of Stockholm-based design studio Front, “because they tend to just want to chew the toilet paper or something anyway.” Founded in 2003, Front initially made its name with Design by Animals (2004), a series of investigations in which the studio gave a material or object to an animal in order to see what they would do with it – the result, whatever the animal’s response, became the final project.[4] Design by Animals was not design for animals,[5] and Lagerkvist is sceptical as to the value of much dedicated pet design, yet she nevertheless understands the desire to mediate the human/pet relationship through objects. “It’s a sign of our idea of pets,” she explains. “We create these objects as a way of inviting them to be a part of our families and for the feeling that they’re comfortable. They’re an acknowledgement of the fact that pets are a part of our lives.” The pet, of course, perceives nothing of this (although that’s not to say that they don’t enjoy a comfy place to sleep and interesting things to play with), but this has little impact on our anthropomorphic projections.
Perhaps this is to be expected. After all, even the idea of a pet as a specific kind of animal entails projection. In Pet Revolution, Hamlett and Strange observe that “there are no pets in nature”, with the word having only acquired its present meaning in the 19th century to describe “a relationship with a special animal, cared for within the home”. Edward fits this definition, clearly, but it would be just as easy for him not to. Lots of cats aren’t pets, just as many species that were kept as pets in the 19th and early 20th centuries – squirrels and starlings, for example – would now raise eyebrows if brought into the home. While certain animals may naturally be better suited to the pet relationship than others (the long history of dog and human interaction, Haraway argues, can be seen as a process of “co-habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality”, that has left dogs as “[partners] in the crime of human evolution”), the category itself remains artificial. “We base our definition of ‘the pet’ on the criteria developed by the historian Keith Thomas for application to human- animal companionship in the past,” explain Hamlett and Strange. “[An] animal kept in the boundaries of domestic space; that was named; and that was not intentionally reared for food.” As a test, I apply these criteria to Edward: 1) he is currently sprawled on the sofa, pawing at a Uniqlo fleece I bought him; 2) he not only has a name, but countless nicknames;[6] as it stands, I have no plans to eat him.
Gerbil-produced wallpaper, from Front’s Design by Animals.
Of Thomas’s tripartite criteria, it’s the idea of shared domestic space that seems the most crucial,[7] particularly as Disegno’s Instagram account has begun filling up with a new type of design content over the past year. Whenever I’ve scrolled through our feed recently, I’ve seen a steady stream of advertising imagery from brands that focus on proud tails and inquisitive snouts, all in service of newly objects for domestic animals. Pet content on Instagram is hardly surprising, but what is unusual is the fact that these designs aren’t being manufactured or distributed by traditional pet brands such as Zooplus, Pets at Home and Fressnapf, but are instead the work of dedicated “design” companies drawn from the realms of furniture, fashion and products. In the last year alone, furniture brands Hay and Poltrona Frau have launched lines for pets, with Ikea having taken the plunge in 2017, while fashion companies Celine and Louis Vuitton have also been busy promoting ranges of pet accessories. Alongside these forays into the market from established design companies, a number of “design-led” pet brands, such as Germany’s LucyBalu, Canada’s Papuk, and the US’s Cat Person, have launched, professing to offer more considered, beautiful products that are beneficial to both pets and the people they live with. “Cats and persons. Two very different animals living under the same roof,” reads Cat Person’s website. “This relationship is a special one. It’s not owner & owned. It’s friends, loved ones, occasional frenemies. And it’s one that has been neglected by the pet industry. Until now.”
So... why now? “Let’s just crudely call it a trend,” says Benjamin Hubert, creative director of British design studio Layer. In 2020, Layer collaborated with Cat Person to design the brand’s cat bed and feeding bowls, and three years later the studio returned to the sector with a range of toys for dog brand Earth Rated (for whom Layer has also worked on branding). While Hubert acknowledges that Layer’s work within pet design has surprised him, particularly given that the studio has hitherto focused on more developed design fields such as consumer technology (“If you’d asked me a few years ago if we would be working in the pet industry, I would have been like, ‘Why would we be doing that?’”), he notes that the trend is, among other things, responding to an economic imperative. “People are spending more money in that space,” he explains, adding that although Layer’s pet products are not particularly expensive – the first question Earth Rated asked the studio was “have you ever designed a product under $10?” – a general increase in spending across the field has raised consumer expectations.
Worldwide, there are somewhere around 471m pet dogs and 370m pet cats, with Bloomberg estimating that the associated pet industry is worth roughly $320bn – a figure that is expected to rise to $500bn by 2030. The largest percentage of that market is food, and veterinary treatment is also a sizeable element, but accessories and objects still form a significant portion of sales, with Britain alone spending £900m on pet products in 2020.[8] Meanwhile, Hamlett and Strange report that Pets at Home, the UK’s largest pet retailer, enjoyed “record-breaking sales worth £1bn with a 35 per cent rise in pre-tax profit to £116.4m in the year to March 2021”. The economic trend, as Hubert notes, is clear, and it seems no coincidence that it appears to have accelerated during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic: a period that saw a large increase in pet ownership (and, correspondingly, pet abandonment), as well as increased spending on home furnishings. “People are looking for things that are a bit more sensitive to their needs and sensibilities,” Hubert says. Whereas traditional pet companies have typically “gone to a factory in China, sourced things, and put their branding on it,” he suggests, the category is now sufficiently valuable to ensure that “somebody at a company might go, ‘You know what, we are going to invest X amount of cash and we are going to get it designed properly.’ That kind of design-driven pet brand is relatively new.”
I think that’s true, but it’s also worth stressing that all products are designed, even those that are not “design-driven”. I’ve just looked over at Edward, for example, who is busy playing on his cat tree. He’s leaping between its platforms, tucking into the covered boxes that adorn its structure at various levels, and occasionally batting at the toy mouse anchored to its apex with elastic – a material that began life as white, but which is now shamefully black with saliva. As you might imagine, Edward’s tree is very grotty. It’s made from low-quality MDF that peeks through in patches where powerful paws have shredded the tree’s fleecy cover, which was, even in its salad days, grotesque. But Edward loves every inch of it. The moment I walk into the room it’s set up in, he rockets up its stepped platforms, meeting me face-to-face for a pat, before chasing after the various ribbons draped over its nested structure. And if his enemy the hoover decides to rear its dreadful sucky face, the tree is the crucial jumping off point from which Edward can escape to the bookcase. As a product, it’s clearly fit for purpose, but there is still a resistance towards labelling objects of its kind as “design”. “Which, really, is a way to. look at the design world’s prejudices,” Lagerkvist suggests. “Love for animals seems to be universal, but it’s an interesting point as to why design has decided that these kinds of products are low status. It makes me wonder if there are certain categories where, if you mix in design, design seems to lose its status?” Part of the issue, she notes, is that products for pets are typically sourced through channels that differ to those through which high-status design, such as furniture, is acquired. “If something is ‘designed’, it’s supposed to tick certain boxes. Design for animals hasn’t been ‘invited’ to become design. It’s sold in regular shops or on platforms where people are making things at home. There’s such an enormous market for these objects, but it’s not considered ‘good design’, because it’s available somewhere else.”
She’s not wrong. I bought Edward’s cat tree on Amazon in 2019 and, five years on, the platform still seems to offer a decent overview of the market – a search for “cat trees” brings up seven pages worth of functionally identical products, all sold by different brands: Yaheetech, PawHut, Feandrea and Jissbon. They would all, I suspect, delight Edward, but they’re not objects you would readily associate with high design values. “There are a lot of products out there,” confirms Mathias Wahrenberger, who co-founded the cat brand LucyBalu with industrial designer Sebastian Frank in 2019. “The pet market is growing and already huge,” he says, “but it’s also been going in the wrong direction from a consumer standpoint, because the products are getting cheaper and cheaper.” Looking at LucyBalu’s website, I can see his point. The brand sells a variety of cat platforms, wall-mounted hammocks and scratching posts that meet all the same functional needs as Edward’s tree, but represent a clear step up in terms of construction and materials. There is, for instance, a startling absence of poorly upholstered fleece. Instead, LucyBalu’s products seem tasteful, well thought through, and solidly made. “We have the parameters of the cat, which are not discussable because if we just do nice looking products that don’t work for them, then it doesn’t make sense,” says Wahrenberger. “But we also want to offer a nice product for the human.”
This split between pet and human is characteristic of the field, whose current development pivots around the idea that objects ought to meet the functional demands of pets, while also aspiring to match human aesthetic norms for interior objects – not look shit, basically. “Pleasing the pet and having something aesthetic don’t need to be mutually exclusive,” says Hubert, “and I think there is a happy medium where you can have things that are sensitively designed, but which also work for the needs and behaviours of the pet.” This ethos is abundantly clear in the work of Papuk, a Canadian cat brand founded in 2022 by interior designer Vazken Karageozian, whose Connect cat tree is a modular series of ash veneer shelves, balanced elegantly atop solid ash dowels. To complete the design, soft cushions, scratch pads and dangling toys can be affixed to each shelf using brown leather straps, such that the tree can be adapted to suit the needs of the cat over time, and individual elements replaced when they become worn. It is, irritatingly, nicer than all of the furniture in my flat, and cats seem to like it too. During my Zoom conversation with Karageozian, one of his cats perched happily atop it throughout, exhibiting the kind of business savvy that should see them immediately appointed Papuk’s head of marketing. “We share our homes with cats and a lot of people are so proud of their cats, but they have the cat tree hidden somewhere in a corner because they don’t want people to see it,” Karageozian tells me. “Regular cat trees are everywhere – they’re a staple – but they all look exactly the same, which is kind of hideous.” I decide not to show him Edward’s.
“We make so many things for the home, and a dog bed is very visible in a space, so why not also come up with something for pets?”
A similar motivation towards integrating human aesthetic standards into pet products is also present in a new collection of dog accessories from Danish design brand Hay. Overseen by Mette Hay, creative director of the company’s accessories line, the collection is thoroughly charming, offering a range of colourful dog beds, toys and bowls, as well as leashes and collars. “Looking at a lot of the pet things that were around, we found that it was all being done in very grey, brown and neutral tones,” Hay tells me, “so it was easy for us to see that we could approach this in a way that would feel more Hay. I felt we could shake things up a bit.” The elements of the range that I’ve seen in person seem to be considerably higher quality than many equivalent products on the market, but Hay keeps our conversation surrounding its motivation light. “We just felt it could be fun, you know,” she tells me. “My driving passion throughout the years has been to search for something that our business is not already working on. We make so many things for the home, and a dog bed is very visible in a space, so why not also come up with something for pets?” If I were a dog, I think, I’d definitely want Hay’s bed.
A dog bed, designed by Hay.
Except, I probably wouldn’t, because I’m mixing up my umwelten. Hay’s collection is beautiful, but its key design decisions are not ones that pets are likely to benefit from directly. That’s not to say that it’s not an excellent product that dogs will like – it looks very comfortable and nicely squashy – just that the unique qualities of the design are principally attractive to humans, rather than dogs. Much of the collection’s pleasure comes from its colours, for instance, but a number of the shades used are not actually visible to dogs, who cannot perceive red. More generally, both Hay and Papuk’s pieces highlight the manner in which many design elements within pet products are almost entirely about human preference, rather than the needs of the other animals who will use them – which isn’t a criticism, but a reality of the way in which different species engage with the world. “Dogs are not concerned by what a thing is but by what they can do with the thing, which will largely concern whether it can be sat on, lain on, chewed or eaten,” Svendsen explains. “A dog has only, to a small extent, a preference for things that have one form rather than another – what’s crucial is whether the thing fits in its mouth or not.” Karageozian makes this same point in relation to Papuk’s Connect tree, particularly given that his design exposes how pet products cater to two user classes simultaneously: meeting the needs of the animal, while also appealing to the human who wields the wallet. “[What we’ve done with Connect] is not for the cat itself, because there are already cat trees that function,” he says. “It’s about people investing in their own spaces.” Both Hay and Papuk seem to have accepted the existing functionality of pet products as largely sufficient;[9] what can be worked on instead is the manner in which they are integrated within shared spaces.
This duality within pet products matches the duality of pets themselves – a set of creatures whose existence as a distinct category of animal is dependent upon their relationship to humans and the spaces in which they are kept. It is a definition that is doubly awkward in terms of the power hierarchies it introduces (Hamlett and Strange note that within the idea of being “a pet” is the idea of being “subjugated to another’s power and [losing] one’s individual personhood”), as well as for the frequently unreasonable expectations it places onto non-human animals. Edward, for example, is lovely to live with. He’s gentle, cuddly and extremely friendly, but on occasion he can also be manic and destructive, which is probably true of most cats and dogs. He shreds and he smashes, and has absolutely no concept of the financial or emotional value of anything he comes across – if it’s whackable, it’s going to get whacked. “They’re creatures that destroy things for fun,” notes Hubert, “so in thinking about them, your mindset is totally different to how it would be in other areas of design where you’re perhaps more precious about an object.” He’s not wrong. I once bought a small ceramic cat that looks a bit like Edward and have suspended it with ribbon from metal shelving above my television console: a fond, decorative tribute to the cat with whom I live. Now, however, when Edward has decided that he wants food, he jumps onto the console and rears up on his hind legs, stretching upwards with his front paws to strike his ceramic double in the face, aggressively clanking it into the shelf – an action that he has learnt will prompt me to get up and make him dinner in order to stop the attack. If it weren’t for the pleasure of watching him assault his own avatar in the name of chicken biscuits, this casual destructiveness would be annoying, but it’s also just a natural consequence of housing a non-human animal in a space that is laden with human meaning. “It may be disheartening for[...] owners to hear this,” notes Svendsen, “but you cannot blame [an animal] because it doesn’t understand something it doesn’t have the prerequisites to understand.”
“They’re creatures that destroy things for fun, so in thinking about them, your mindset is totally different to how it would be in other areas of design.”
One outcome of Svendsen’s call for improved interspecies understanding is to encourage greater consideration of the ways in which domestic space is set up for pets. Cats, for instance, experience a space as essentially “vertically oriented”, explains Svendsen, “while a human space is more horizontal”. This is why “a cat will continually jump up onto things and down from them, and often choose to jump over things instead of walking around them.” As such, any effort to restrict their movement across shelves, tables and the like is fundamentally contrary to the manner in which they process and move through space – you can do it up to a point, depending on how tractable your cat is, but you’re hardly accommodating their natural behaviour. Equally, cats struggle with change, and form strong territorial connections to a particular space and the manner in which it has been organised – introducing new elements or altering existing ones is stressful. “[Cats] are happy once they have been able to set up a complete set of associations between what each feature of that environment looks, sounds and smells like,” explains Bradshaw in his 2013 book Cat Sense. “This explains why cats immediately pay attention to anything that changes – move a piece of furniture from one side of the room to the other, and your cat, finding that its predictable set of associations have been broken, will feel compelled to inspect it carefully before it can settle down again.”
Dogs are more adaptable within spaces given that their predominant connection is to the people they live with rather than a territory, but this is not to say that their insertion into human spaces is trouble free. Like cats, dogs chew and scratch, and their experience of the world is heavily mediated by scent, as opposed to our emphasis on vision. “[Dogs’] noses must surely be insulted by what must seem to them to be the overpowering odours of our detergents, fabric softeners and ‘room fragrances’,” writes Bradshaw. “[Presumably] they just get used to them, accepting them as an unavoidable downside of sharing a living space with the humans they are so closely bonded to.” This notion of dogs accommodating humans is significant, not least because the same kind of interspecies accommodation is frequently missing on the other side. “[Many] owners will prefer not to encourage their dogs to go upstairs, or sleep on their beds with them,” writes Bradshaw, adding that these relatively minor restrictions on movement are frequently paired with restrictions on behaviours inconvenient to humans, but which come naturally to dogs – barking, herding, chasing, gnawing. “[Dogs], as living beings, cannot be re-engineered every decade or so as if they were computers or cars.[10] In the past, when dogs’ functions were mostly rural, it was accepted that they were intrinsically messy and needed to be managed on their own terms. Today, by contrast, many pet dogs live in circumscribed, urban environments, and are expected to be simultaneously better behaved than the average human child and as self-reliant as an adult.”
Layer’s dog toys for Earth Rated.
A different way of putting Bradshaw’s point would be to acknowledge that pets introduce design challenges for domestic spaces that a lot more could be done to address. “A pet is a user,” says Hubert, “and if there’s anything I’ve learned from working on lots of different things, it’s that all design is just user challenges, user problems, user solving.” Hubert’s bed and bowls for Cat Person, for instance, appear more considerate to cats’ needs than most. The bed comes with a cosy, felt canopy that transforms it into a covered hideaway, but this canopy can also be folded down to offer a more open bed, or else removed entirely. This checks out with my experiences of Edward. Sometimes he wants to nap quietly under duvets and throws, burrowing as deep as he can, while at other points he scrabbles up my back to lay dozily on my shoulders, peering out at the flat from on high. “Cats are really fickle, to the point of hilarity,” notes Hubert, “so you can’t have a one-size-fits all solution. The [Cat Person] bed is just showing a bit of empathy towards the fact that they might sometimes want to cosy up somewhere dark, and they might sometimes want to have a bit more peripheral vision.” Cat Person’s bowls, meanwhile, break with an industry norm of scaling down dog bowls, which typically have straight sides. Instead, Layer has designed its bowls to flare outwards towards their rim so as to avoid agitating the cat’s whiskers as it eats, while an attachable stand means that the bowl can be raised up once a cat grows out of kittenhood to ensure it remains at a comfortable eating height. “Which is all very simple,” says Hubert, “but just shows a bit more consideration for the cat. I think anybody who can’t see the value added by design in any field misses a trick, because there are always things that can be improved. Design shouldn’t be vanity – it’s there to solve problems.”
One of the more interesting suggestions for how products could help to solve problems generated by the integration of human and non-human experiences of space came from one of the earliest of the new raft of pet design projects: Lurvig, a pet range launched by Ikea in 2017, and designed by Inma Bermúdez and Moritz Krefter of Studio Inma Bermúdez. Krefter and Bermúdez designed Lurvig to include a number of standalone products, but also prioritised elements that could be integrated into existing Ikea furniture. The collection’s scratching post, for instance, is a mat that wraps around a table leg using velcro, while its cat bed is square so as to fit neatly into the shelves of the company’s Kallax shelving unit, thereby providing a cosy hideaway that doesn’t take up additional floorspace. “Humanising is a big mistake, because at the end of the day the product is not going to be used by you,” says Bermúdez. “There are many products on the market – which I really don’t like – that try to convert your pet into a child.” As such, Bermúdez and Krefter prioritised smaller nudges to the design of environments, reasoning that this was one way to lean into pets’ existing behaviours, while still trying to meet human aesthetic standards. “You can’t anthropomorphise,” says Bermúdez, “because there is a need for well-designed products that actually think about the needs of dogs and cats.”
Layer’s bed and bowls for Cat Person.
The problems addressed by Bermúdez and Layer’s collections are small, but may represent the kind of issues that should be tackled by design, particularly given that the friction that many pets experience in domestic spaces is almost entirely caused by people. The presence of pets in homes is, after all, a human contrivance – the cats and dogs themselves rarely have any say in the matter.[11] When I adopted Edward as a stray kitten from Cats Protection, he did not decide whether to live with me. Instead, he was forcibly moved into a space that he would not have selected of his own accord, not least because it involved a 15-mile trip down a motorway and Edward does not, at present, own a car (note to self: buy Edward a car to prove my love). While he now seems extremely positive about his living arrangements – he’s marching back and forth across the desk as I write this, happily ramming his face into the edge of the laptop screen – the whole setup has a slight Stockholm Syndrome vibe: I control where he can go within the space; when he can go outside (as a renter I do not, alas, have a cat flap); and what behaviours are encouraged and discouraged. I am his friend. Pat. I am his provider. Pat. I am... sort of his jailor? Pat. Given all the restrictions that I place on his movement, I’ve come to think that it’s probably not too much to ask that I let him sit on my laptop once in a dfqrjuFBR3HUOBFGRVTY. Yet this desire to make pets comfortable, and to accommodate their needs, has clear implications for design. “Cats are being humanised more and more – they are becoming part of the family,” LucyBalu’s Wahrenberger tells me. “So we have always said that if cats are really becoming part of the family, you should think about cat supplies as furniture.” Co-founder Sebastian Frank is in full agreement: “We see ourselves as a furniture company more than a pet supply company.”
This desire to frame pet products as a sub-sector of furniture design is surprisingly common. On one level, it may be an attempt to borrow credibility and respectability from a more established design field, applying it to a category that has “been a bit maligned historically,” according to Hubert. “There is a stigma, definitely,” says Wahrenberger. “We have encountered big designers who have said, ‘I don’t want my name to be attached to that kind of product,’ because it’s seen as kind of dirty, so that’s a reputational risk.” Framing pet products in terms of furniture, however, represents one way in which companies can subvert preconceptions around who “design” is for, and apply the values that are already attached to human-centric terminology and typologies to a user base that has often been ignored. “There is a kind of hierarchy [in design],” says Hubert. “You would traditionally prioritise things for you and the people you love, whereas a pet would be very secondary. But since becoming a pet owner, I’ve seen that it’s actually a really desirable space and very underserved.”[12] In contrast to LucyBalu, Hubert does not explicitly frame his cat bed as furniture, but he is nevertheless clear on the value of taking pet design seriously. “As designers, if we work on a chair, how many other people have already worked on that typology?” he says. “It’s prestigious and desirable, of course, but how much value can you add? There are a lot of categories out there in design, like pets, which are not traditionally sexy, but which are actually the ones with the biggest opportunity.”
“There is a stigma. It’s seen as kind of dirty by some designers, so that’s a reputational risk.”
Nevertheless, the linguistic shift towards “furniture”, or the wider insistence on recognising design values within the field, is also a response to the cost of many of these products. LucyBalu’s Dinghy cat bed, for instance, is priced at €129, whereas “a pet shop will say that a cat bed needs to be €17.99,” says Wahrenberger. “So if we try to sell through pet shops, they’ll just say, ‘OK, your bed is €129. What the fuck?’” With this in mind, LucyBalu sells directly through its website, where it can better frame the narrative around its products. “We want to use the phrase ‘cat furniture’ to show that we think about products for cats from an interior standpoint,” continues Wahrenberger. “It takes the same amount of material to create a table as it does a cat tree, but it’s easier to position a table as being worth more. Probably the biggest critique that we face is that we’re expensive.” It’s an experience that is familiar to Papuk, whose Connect cat tree and accompanying accessories retail at around £700. “We’ve been very careful with the language,” Karageozian tells me. “You see people spending thousands on a side table, but they’ll then ask, ‘Why is a cat tree £700?’ But [Connect] has complicated details and is as complex as any furniture piece, which is why it costs that. That’s why we say ‘furniture’.”
I think Karageozian and Wahrenberger’s arguments are reasonable, and the cost of their products justifiable for those who can afford them, but the expense of the new raft of pet designs does feed into a potential criticism of the field: that it is applying human metrics of value, design and problem solving to a terrain where they do not comfortably fit. In Animal Architecture, for example, Dobraszczyk argues that “the biggest obstacle to a genuinely ecological architecture is the human sense of revulsion at nature, unbidden, trying to get back in” – we spend too much time, he suggests, worrying about preserving distinctions between humans and other, wild, animal species, and should instead develop spaces that integrate the two in “healthier, more mutually supportive relationships”.
Papuk’s Connect cat tree.
Dobraszczyk’s wider message of tolerance has applications for pets too. As opposed to focusing on designing out the odours, damage, mess and conflicting interests that non-human animals bring into human spaces, Dobraszczyk suggests that we work towards building more genuinely interspecies spaces: instead of “believing that firm boundaries between nature and the built environment can somehow be restored, we should rather embrace their discomforting dissolution”. One method for achieving such spaces could be to focus on pet design – generating new, dedicated solutions for meeting the needs of domestic animals and people – but a simpler, and cheaper, approach would just be to relax our restrictions around how such animals are permitted to behave in a space, which is what the pets seem to want anyway. Dobraszczyk, for example, cites his own dog Charlie, who “generally finds little pleasure in occupying spaces or structures apart from our own,” and who instead “chooses to occupy the home entirely as a consequence of our actions, seeking at all times to remain close to whoever happens to be around at the time”. As such, Charlie’s “designated spaces” in the home are not specific to him, but rather “entwined” with those of Dobraszczyk and his family. In other words, fewer specialist cat beds for Edward; more letting Edward get into bed.
The most obvious reason why this does not happen more often is because of the commercial opportunities that swirl around pets. This is a point I put to Alexandra Midal, a theorist who has proven prescient in the field of animals and design. In 2015, Midal curatedThe Animal Party, a provocative exhibition showing projects from design students at Switzerland’s HEAD- Genève university that explored some of the theoretical implications of designing for animals, and the political complexities of their place in human society. The Animal Party was ahead of its time in terms of its consideration of interspecies design, particularly given that the topic is now a critical darling,[13] but Midal is careful to flag its potential limitations. “We don’t know what [pets] want, so we have these projections, all the time, about what their needs are,” she tells me. “It’s a presumption in the name of others, on behalf of others, which is a highly problematic thing.” Nevertheless, Midal also acknowledges that the horse has already bolted when it comes to pet design, with the commercial field having expanded rapidly. “I was noticing at the time [of The Animal Party] that big companies were starting pet departments and I know the cynicism of that,” she says. “It’s a new market and a new niche. Actually, I wouldn’t even call it cynicism – it’s pure capitalism. There is a market, there is a need. We go there.”
“We don’t know what pets want, so we have these projections, all the time, about what their needs are.”
If there’s one thing that capitalism is good at, however, it is using products to shape the perceptions of those who exist within its frameworks – something Spillers was exploiting all the way back in 1919. This effect is typically negative – and largely focused on persuading people to buy products they don’t need – but there may be potential for it be applied towards more positive ends too. In 2004, for instance, designers James Tuthil, Johannes Paul, Simon Nicholls and William Windham founded Omlet, a pet-care company that grew out of Eglu, a project the four developed while studying design at London’s Royal College of Art. Created as part of an effort to reimagine the typology of a chicken coop, Eglu sought to shed any connotations of agricultural infrastructure and instead recast the form as a piece of polished product design – a brightly coloured injection-moulded plastic structure, clipped into an attached run. “We always believed that this was interesting as a piece of design because it wasn’t just about making a product,” Paul tells me. “The whole idea of the Eglu was whether we could change people’s perception of chickens as a farmyard animal through the design of a product. If you have a chicken coop that doesn’t look like a chicken coop, can you also get rid of all the previous concepts of what chicken keeping should be?”
Chickens represent a more challenging case study for thinking about pets than cats and dogs,[14] but Paul is adamant that the objects that swirl around all pets play a determining role in the ways in which we perceive the animals. “Think about a dog bed,” he tells me. “A lot of people would say, ‘What more is there to do with its design? It’s basically just a cushion on the floor, right?’ But there’s actually a lot of exasperation when you talk to customers about dog beds, because most of the products are poor quality, they start to smell, and cleaning them is a huge problem.”[15] These negative connotations surrounding objects for pets, Paul suggests, have a habit of bleeding through into our perception of the pet, not least because “pets can’t talk, so there’s a lot of responsibility on objects to facilitate that relationship [between animal and human].”
There’s something to that. Because non-human animals have no space for commercialism and its concerns within their umwelten, the products that most obviously meet their needs are ones that deal with brute bodily realities. There are beds to sleep, shed and drool in; toys to rend, savage and dismember in imitation of hunting behaviour; bowls to house food in, because Edward’s desire to hoover raw meat directly off the kitchen floor is not a behaviour I wish to indulge; and litter trays to deal with the terrible consequences of said hoovering. In contrast to other areas of commerce, pet products are more explicitly concerned with the basic, more animal, elements of what it is to exist – elements that are not always delightful to deal with. “What we’re doing as product designers in this area is trying to remove a lot of the chores surrounding pets, and allowing more of the experience to just be a sense of togetherness,” says Paul. “If you can deal with some of those issues through design, that helps remove any negative associations, because these relationships between humans and animals can be so unique and special.” These may not be alluring challenges for a designer, but that’s not to say they aren’t worthwhile addressing. “When you’re looking at pet design as a career, you don’t see Gucci or Prada, you don’t see Flos or B&B Italia, so it doesn’t have that allure for young designers,” he continues. “There aren’t the premium brands that you have in lots of other design fields, which give cachet and glamour to the industry, and that’s been a problem. For years and years, it has been about designing to a price point and trying to make it cheaper, whereas it should be about trying to enable the relationship between the pet and the human to be beneficial to both parties.”
That’s a noble aim, but pat. Edward is done with such considerations. PatPatPatPatPat! The ceramic avatar is being thwacked ferociously, signalling that feeding time is upon us. It’s an object I bought to be purely decorative, but in which Edward has discovered deep, untapped function as a dinner bell. But then, Edward, like all pets, is good at subverting products – in fact, their capacity to undermine straightforward understandings of products is probably present in the very idea of a pet to begin with. After all, Edward’s status under British law is not that of an individual with guaranteed rights. Instead, he is classified as “property”, which is an exceptionally odd and uneasy thought given that he’s a living being. While pet design may seek to mediate the human/pet relationship through specialist objects, the status of the pets themselves is uncomfortably close to the designs that accommodate them.
“[As] much as humans might think of their pet as a person, pets are commodities too,” write Hamlett and Strange, which is an unpleasant, but accurate description. While I may not think of myself as Edward’s owner, I did pay to adopt him. “This does not thwart [pets’] importance as emotional attachments, but it does complicate it,” add Hamlet and Strange. “[Most] people do own their pet, as both a product with a personality and as a much-valued – emotionally if not always financially – possession.” Which may be true, but just try telling that to Edward! Like all pets, he defies easy categorisation, just as he defies the straightforward applications of design – at present, he’s busy spraying shards of chicken across the room, successfully evading the silicone mat that I bought to catch errant crumbs. After he’s done with dinner, he’ll probably smash up some ornaments, before striding past the unused cat bed en route to my bed. After all, the law may see him as property, and design may see him as a user, but Edward’s umwelt has no space for such concepts. If there’s one thing I can be sure of, it’s that Edward has other ideas.
[1] Svendsen actually asks the question about dogs, but I’m using creative licence.
[2] I also gabble admiring nonsense at him. This morning, for instance, I assured him that he would have a strong mandate if he were ever to run for mayor of the flat.
[3] I thought he might like to see what the bigger cats look like.
[4] A two-layer wallpaper was handed to rats and gerbils, who gnawed through the top sheet to reveal patches of pattern beneath; clay coat pegs were constricted into form by the coils of a snake; and a fantastically bizarre lampshade was created by recording the flightpath of a fly around a lightbulb.
[5] Instead, the project was a kind of send-up of designers’ pretensions to be in control of their own processes. “It was an exploration of chance, and inviting that into the design process,” says Lagerkvist. “For us, animals were a vehicle to have different conversations about design.”
[6] Monkey, Lord Potato and Susan B. Handsomey, to name just a few.
[7] Although the pets themselves might put not eating them top.
[8] To give you a sense of rough ratios, the UK spent £2.9bn on pet food and £2.1bn on veterinary services in that same year.
[9] There are, however, debates to be had around sustainability given the quality of both companies’ products. “It’s the last cat tree you’ll ever buy,” Karageozian tells me, contrasting this to the fact that many pet products are low-quality and disposable. “The elephant in the room with the pet industry is that it creates a lot of waste,” agrees Hubert.
[10] The irony being that dogs have been subject to intensive breeding programmes to encourage particular behaviours and traits. Despite this, Bradshaw notes, there is an increasing proportion of dogs whose breeds were originally developed to fulfil specific tasks, but whose “sole [contemporary] function is to be family pets. Although many working types have successfully adapted, others were and still are poorly suited to this new role.”
[11] The reverse can also happen, however. A stray cat called Olaf has forcibly moved into my parents’ kitchen, for example, and now refuses to leave. He’s absolutely brilliant.
[12] Hubert has a dog called Pochi, who is adorable and sometimes appears on the Layer Instagram account – it is always very exciting when this happens.
[13] In 2022, for example, the Netherlands’ Het Nieuwe Instituut for architecture, design and digital culture declared itself a zoöp – an institutional model that “makes the interests of nonhuman life part of organisational decision making”.
[14] Their relative lack of integration with domestic space creates complexity, as does their overlap with agriculture in the manner that Omlet describes.
[15] It’s worth noting that Omlet’s method for designing dog beds to avoid this problem is, fundamentally, to make them more like human beds. “Our range is about being fully washable,” says Paul. “It’s more like your own bed, where you would change the duvet once a week.”
Words Oli Stratford
Illustrations: Kristina Micotti
This article was originally published in Disegno #37. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.