Walkie Walkie
From owner to co-walker.
Brand & Digital Experience
Challenge
Strategy
Identity
Digital
Experience
Application
Outcome
Reflection
Context
Self-initiated Brand, MA Graduation Project (CSM)
Role
Lead Designer
Deliverables
Brand Identity, UI/UX, Experience Design
Year
2026
Location
London, UK
Challenge
Pet technology knows how to track our dogs.
Walkie Walkie asks how to walk with them.
Walkie Walkie is a brand that rethinks the daily dog walk, made up of a collar for the dog and an app for the human.
Walking is one of the clearest chances to understand our dogs. Yet the walk is shaped by humans: the leash, the route, the pace. Pet technology follows the same logic, built around tracking and control, measuring what owners want to know rather than how dogs experience the world. Meanwhile, a dog’s signals are subtle and fleeting, easy to miss no matter how attentive we are.
The result is a quiet gap: we live closely with our dogs, yet may still not fully understand them. How might a walk shift from a human-led routine into something truly shared?
Strategy
Let the dog lead the walk.
It comes down to one shift: from owner to co-walker. Rather than monitoring the dog, Walkie Walkie helps the human understand it. When we stop directing the walk and start responding to our dogs’ signals, each walk uncovers little surprises: the corner they always avoid, the spot they love to mark... Bit by bit, these small discoveries add up to truly knowing them.
This happens through two connected touchpoints: the sensing collar reads live body cues to give the dog's signals a voice, while the app lets the human notice, tag, and keep those moments. Together, the daily walk stops being a routine and becomes a shared story worth keeping.
Identity
Built around how dogs walk, sense and see.
The identity system takes shape from the dog. Every visual element grows out of how dogs actually move: curved, branching, looping... At its core is a hand-drawn wordmark built from those movements, extended into a graphic language of routes and traces. The palette is also anchored in what dogs can see. Together, they carry one idea: the design follows the dog.
The wordmark and W mark are hand-drawn as flowing lines, shaped like the paths a dog traces on a walk, with the W written in a single continuous stroke.
This line extends into the trails, the brand’s supporting graphic, and carries into the app as the route on the map and the heart-rate line.
Meanwhile, as dogs see mostly in blue and yellow, the two colors lead the palette, while green and pink extend it to four, one for each kind of moment tagged in the app.
Digital
From signals to understanding.
Walkie Walkie brings a sensing collar and an app together into one continuous walking experience, shared between the dog and the co-walker.
The collar reads the dog’s heart rate and movement as the walk unfolds. The app is where the co-walker meets those signals, turning them into moments to tag, revisit and keep.
The icons are simple and rounded, so a moment can be tagged in a second without interrupting the walk.
They are organised into four categories based on what the dog is doing: tending to its own body, exploring its surroundings, socialising with others, and bonding with its co-walker.
From the tagged moments, Walkie picks out the ones that stand out and turns them into cards in Discover. Each card leads with a short finding about the dog, with the data behind it, and the co-walker can add their own notes.
Over time, these discoveries come together in the dog’s profile, where the proportion of the four colours forms its personality type. With each walk, the profile becomes more accurate, and the co-walker gains a clearer understanding of their dog.
Experience
One walk, seen from both sides.
Several dogs and their co-walkers were invited to experience Walkie Walkie on their everyday walks.
Shown here is Beny’s walk.
Ready to Start · Putting On the Collar
Ready to Start · Beny’s View
Each walk was recorded from two points of view: the co-walker’s, and one simulating the dog’s eye level, with the live data shown alongside.
Running · Co-walker’s View
Running · Beny’s View
Treat Time · Co-walker’s View
Treat Time · Beny’s View
Meeting a Friend · Co-walker’s View
Meeting a Friend · Beny’s View
Seeing the two side by side puts the viewer in the dog’s position, which is the shift the whole project is built around.
Sniff · Beny’s View
Sniff · Tagging the Moment
Application
Beyond the digital experience, the identity extends into a campaign and social content. Each of the four posters pairs one trail with a dog behaviour, bringing the brand’s graphic language and the dog’s way of walking together. The social stories follow the same voice, built around the small moments the walk uncovers.
Outcome
The co-walkers who took part were often surprised by their own dogs, noticing things they had never seen before, and felt they were getting to know them a little better with every walk. It showed the shift from owner to co-walker happening in practice.
The project was also shortlisted for the Spatial Practices Prize at the Central Saint Martins MA Degree Show 2026.
Hardware Partner: Beituiu Technology
Reflection
"Between the question and the brand"
"Know what to leave out"
"Let real walks shape the design"
The project was shaped by two pulls: a critical question about pet technology built around control, and the wish to make something people would actually use. Rather than choosing one, I kept the question at the core and let it shape a brand that works in daily life. The co-walker idea still challenges control, but it reaches people as a better way to walk, not as an argument.
The collar was built with a manufacturer of health-monitoring collars, so the hardware also tracked breathing and body movement, and came with training features like shock or vibration fences. The training features went first, as controlling the dog runs against the idea of a co-walker. Breathing and movement were dropped too, as testing showed they barely changed on a walk.
Many early decisions rested on assumptions that seemed obvious, but testing overturned them again and again. Each dog had a character of its own. This shifted the starting point of the design from assumptions to each dog’s real, often unexpected behaviour. Discover keeps these surprises, and walk by walk they unlock a fuller picture of the dog.
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