Pet Haven

Inspiration

Losing a pet is not only an emotional experience, but also a difficult process of deciding what to do with the physical remains of a companion who has been part of everyday life. Traditional pet urns often treat memorialization as a static container. We wanted to explore a different question: What if a memorial could become a continuing presence in someone's home?

Pet Haven was inspired by the idea that remembrance does not have to mean preserving something exactly as it was. A pet could become an object, a sculpture, a plant, or another form of life that continues to occupy space in our daily environment.

What it does

Pet Haven is a digital memorial platform that guides pet owners through choosing, designing, and ordering a personalized memorial for their pet.

Users enter one of three memorial spaces — The Resting Sphere, The Quiet Companion, or The Living Vessel — and then create a personalized object based on their pet.

Users can identify their pet as a cat or dog, provide breed information when relevant, upload a photo, and customize different parts of the memorial object. The final design is intended to become a physical 3D-printed object produced by an artist.

The Living Vessel explores another possibility: allowing a pet's ashes to become part of the soil, transforming the memorial into a new living presence.

How we built it

We approached Pet Haven as an AI-native prototyping experiment.

We first used Lovable to rapidly translate the concept into a functional web prototype and test the basic user flow. Instead of spending significant time building the interface from scratch, we used AI-assisted development to move quickly between idea, interface, and interaction.

We then used Google AI Studio and Gemini to further develop the final AI-oriented experience, particularly around the concept of pet recognition, personalized visual generation, and the transformation of a pet photograph into a memorial object.

The visual design combines architectural references, product visualization, generative AI, and 3D-printing concepts into one continuous experience.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was translating an emotional and highly personal experience into a digital interface without making it feel like a conventional e-commerce configurator.

Another challenge was the gap between generating an appealing image and generating something that could actually become a physical object. AI can create visually convincing forms very quickly, but manufacturability, geometry, scale, material constraints, and 3D-printing requirements introduce a different level of complexity.

We therefore treated this prototype as an exploration of the complete experience rather than claiming that the AI-generated object is already production-ready.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that Pet Haven evolved from an abstract idea into an interactive product experience within a short development cycle.

The project connects several disciplines that are usually separated: spatial design, AI, digital fabrication, product design, and emotional storytelling.

Most importantly, the prototype demonstrates how AI-assisted development can allow a designer to move from a conceptual idea to a testable product experience without needing to build every technical layer from scratch.

What we learned

We learned that the hardest part of building an AI product is often not generating something, but deciding what should be generated, why it matters, and how it fits into a meaningful user experience.

We also learned that AI dramatically lowers the cost of prototyping, which shifts the designer's role from simply producing interfaces toward defining systems, experiences, and value.

For Pet Haven, the most important design decision was not the AI itself. It was creating a clear emotional journey: enter a space, remember a pet, create something personal, and give that memory a physical presence.

What's next for Pet Haven

The next step is to move from visual prototype to a real production pipeline.

This includes improving pet-specific 3D generation, converting generated forms into manufacturable 3D models, testing different printing materials and scales, and connecting users with verified 3D-printing artists.

We also want to explore the aftercare experience beyond the memorial object itself — including production tracking, artist communication, delivery, and eventually a more trusted end-to-end pet aftercare network.

The long-term vision is for Pet Haven to become more than an urn platform: a system for transforming loss into an ongoing, tangible form of companionship.

Built With

• 3d
• 3d-visualization
• ai-prototyping
• gemini
• generative-ai
• google-ai-studio
• lovable