Pedigree

My multivitamin pills are getting old. How can I tell? They reek. Like dog food. It's quite revolting.

Speaking of dog food, some of my college friends will remember how it seemed like every other project I did for my Product Design classes at Stanford centered around dogs. While I love dogs, it was not by choice that I ended up designing products for dogs, their owners, caretakers, veterinarians, and food manufacturers. You name it, I brainstormed it. (Don't believe me? Somewhere in a box I have logbook sketches of various devices to save owners the trouble of picking up poo. One design boldly assumed that dogs do not care about diaper rash. This idea thankfully never reached user-testing.)

Man, I don't know what sort of canine obsession our teachers all shared, but they apparently did not feel sorry for the one student in our class who was deathly afraid of dogs. No joke, she was in tears when our first dog project got announced. And she was in tears for the second one. And the next one. Of course, no one feels sorry for her now, because she braved through it all, graduated as the star of our class, and is now working at IDEO (the Google of the design industry). I don't believe she receives any sympathy from her unemployed, starving, designer friends.

So what was the point of this post? Oh yes. A classmate recently pointed out that Masterfoods USA, which sponsored one of our final dog projects, has begun implementing some of our design solutions for their Pedigree brand of dog food. I browsed the website and it's neat to observe how the fruits of many a late night actually came to see the light of day. That rocks.