Traveling with your pets is a project aimed at the growing pet transportation market, discovering pet owners' insights by user-centric research, and generating ideal solutions with the industrial design process. People want to keep connected and stay closer with their pets, provide them a better living condition but avoid spending too much time doing trivia. The future pet products would be more caring, more functional and more intelligent, they can create a better bonding experience between humans and pets. As a potential solution, Jcpet Carrier fulfills these expectations. Jcpet Carrier represents a new generation of pet transport product, it encourages users to take their pets outside and enjoy nature with no fear by its multi-purpose design. The carrier also has smart management features to help user manage their pets and stay connected when they are not at home.

This project begins with secondary research about cat history and pet transportation history, along with a comparison of emerging pet products in the market, to generate user's insights. People want to keep connected and stay closer with their pets, provide them a better living condition but avoid spending too much time doing trivia like cleaning cat litter. The future pet products would be more caring, more functional and more intelligent, they can create a better bonding experience between humans and pets. Then the process moves towards primary research to discover market opportunities and customer behavior. Through an online survey, interview and competitor business model research, a clear direction is identified, which is the high-end pet transportation market and especially transport by driving. Then, in order to wear the user's shoes, user personas are created. One is a single programmer lives far away from families with one cat, and the other is a married middle-aged woman with a cat and a small dog. After these research and analysis, sketch process begins for innovative features and forms. During sketch process, tools like mood board and enabling technology are created as a guide to design. After a lot of discussion with peers, the final concept is decided, then comes mock-up testing, prototyping, and rendering. Jcpet carrier is made up of two parts. The upper part is a pet nest as well as a handbag if user wants to transport a pet in it. In appearance design, it simulates a cat with cat ears and face. There are belts inside both cat ears which can pull out and lock into the back bottom part of the bag and turn it into a backpack. The cat face is a body condition indicator, it receives data from a sensor inside the bag and shows how your pets are feeling in graphic. These data include heart rate, body temperature and breath rate of your pet. What's more, on back side of the bag, two retractable safety lockers are designed to attach the bag on passenger seats as children safety seats. Around two opening gates of the bag, TPU fabric collapsible tunnels are designed to provide pet larger space. The bottom part of the Jcpet Carrier is a smart pet manager, it allows user to communicate with pets remotely. It can release laser game and ball game to help users manage pets, it can contain and give food to pets. The manager has smart following features and a gyroscope is inside to keep balance. Users can put both parts of Jcpet Carrier separately or combine them together as a small autonomous vehicle for pets.