A new perspective on sharing living spaces

The pet market in Italy is now worth over five billion euros and is growing at a rate that few other sectors can boast. Yet, until recently, the design world looked at this economy with a distance, as if dogs and cats could not be the object of serious design. Something is changing and Milan, during the last design week, gave a concrete demonstration of this.

The Pet Design District, the first district in Italia entirely dedicated to design for pets, has opened in Via Feltre, with twelve selected brands and a programme of conferences bringing designers, companies, academics and animal behaviour professionals around the same table. Co-curator of the project is Amelia Valletta, architect, applied zoo-anthropologist and founder of The HAD Human Animal Design, today the most authoritative voice in Italia on this subject. She has built her method by interweaving two apparently distant backgrounds, design and ethology, with a master's degree in education and behavioural rehabilitation of dogs at the University of Parma. The result is an approach that is not limited to aesthetics but starts from a precise question: how does the animal really experience this space? What does it perceive, where does it seek refuge, how does it interact with its owner in the shared environment? The answer is precisely "human animal design", the evolution of pet design understood not as a merchandise category but as a discipline that integrates architecture, ethology and veterinary medicine to design environments and products capable of improving the animal's wellbeing and, at the same time, the quality of the relationship with the human being.

There are three cardinal principles of the HAD method: ethological well-being, relationship quality and biosustainability. Up to now, pet design has been tainted with anthropocentrism, thought out for how it appears to the owner, not for how it is experienced by the animal. A kennel that is aesthetically pleasing but built with materials that retain heat, or with proportions that force the dog into incorrect postures, is not a good product, whatever the price. This paradigm shift affects a market that is still largely immature in terms of design, but with an increasingly sophisticated demand. Pet owners are now informed consumers, willing to invest, attentive to the quality of materials, durability, consistency with the home environment. They demand objects that do not hide in a corner, but inhabit the space with the same dignity as any other furniture. Human Animal Design makes this a cultural issue before being a commercial one: training designers capable of reading animal needs is the condition for building an offer that is up to the mark.

It is no coincidence that Amelia Valletta has for years been directing the Pet Design courses at Poli.design at the Milan Polytechnic, the first structured training course in Italia on this discipline. The next step is to move on to hotels, urban spaces, healthcare facilities, means of transport. Wherever people and animals share a space, there is a possible project. And a market waiting to be taken seriously.