ABOUT

“Bonds” – a research project that delved into the topic of the human relationship with their pets.

I have always been interested in representing emotions because of its subjectivity, and I like to gather real data to create a visual representation of feelings. During this research project, I came up with the idea that humans invest feelings into pets, but we cannot prove for certain that our pets invest feeling into us.

I used this information to create a poster that invited people to get involved in the interview to create new visual experiments.

I conducted a series of interviews to collect different perspectives on how people feel this relationship.

Interviews to pet owners

In the first part of the interview I used a sheet and a circle to represent all the people that interviewees know in their life. Inside the circle are family members and important friends and outside the circle is everyone else.

I asked them to position themselves inside the circle where they feel more comfortable. Next, they were asked to position their family members with a blue colour, and their pets with a red colour, with the relative positions representing how close their relationship is.

I observed that the majority of the interviewees feel closer to their pets than their family members.

In the second part of the interview, I asked them to use shapes and colours to represent their relationship with their pets.

I used these responses to design a poster that expresses the diversity of emotions in how humans feel their relationship is with their pets.