Paw Portal

Paw Portal is a concept created for my final presentation in the IBM Accelerate - Design Track Cohort of 2024.

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I have quite a few bones to pick with the regular pet door.

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As a proud owner of two cats, one of them pretty outdoorsy, there have more times than I can count where the cat door:

• Accidentally locks itself
• Or worst, lets them carry in prey from their midnight hunting

If we change the entry mode to enter only or leave only, then we end up locking our cats to one side of the door, which they really dislike.

I think it’s time we had a better solution for this. That’s where I came in to design….

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Paw Portal, a pet door that’s actually smart.‍

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Before I got into actually building out my feature list, I did some user research - that being the friends and family around me. I asked them questions like ”what is repetitive about your experience with” and “what could be improved” to really poke at their problems with pet doors.

From these user interviews, I learned a couple other issues and potential solution I had never thought of myself:

• First, people are often frustrated by not knowing whether their pet is in/outdoors when they leave their cat door open both ways.
• I also learned that most pets have a microchip that the vet can use to scan if they every get lost.

Using that research, I came up with a list of plausible features:

• With an app, you could lock or unlock the pet door from your phone (or even share that access with friends!)
• The app could also tell you when your pets are home,
• Allow you to create a curfew,
• Enable selective entry only for your pets’ microchip,
• And more!

With the addition of a camera (which from market research, I see no smart pet doors have), you could also view and speak to your pets, in addition to enabling some smart AI features to solve that problem of your pets bringing in unwanted guests.

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Finally, a lesson about unintended consequences made me think of a bad scenario that could occur with this door:

• Imagine your pet is on the run from another animal, maybe a cat running from a big dog. In that case, the door should be able to see your cat and another animal running towards the door and only let your cat enter. The solution to this is technically complex (probably involving AI), but could prevent a potentially fatal, unintended consequence.
• If the attempted solution involves AI, it would need to involve some AI transparency about its margin of unpredictability.

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