pH-auna was hired by Paws for Purple Hearts, a US based organizat5ion that offers Canine Assisted Warrior Therapy®, to assist them analyze, create, and build a service dog training facility. This gave us a unique chance to question preconceptions about the built environment, because, unlike previous facilities designed for humans and later modified for multi-species usage, the PPH's complex had yet to break ground.

The PPH team believed that a successful design for a service dog training facility would take into account dogs' experience of use - based on their species-specific characteristics and capabilities - with the physical space incorporating canine-centric specifications in terms of materials, space layout, lighting, and sound; however, they did not know how to go about determining the specifics. We created a toolbox to aid the PPH team in understanding service dogs as users.

The toolbox included three resources. The first was concerned with establishing the sorts of multi-species interactions that the facility would have to accommodate. The second allowed PPH team members to assess how different locations inside the facility would need to respond to the demands of human and canine stakeholders in order to carry out training and administrative tasks as effectively as possible. The third envisioned the building's layout as an empty game board that would be filled with cards symbolizing the various regions of the facility and their square footage, each color-coded to indicate which stakeholder - human or canine - it should focus on.