You are precious

A very appealing application named Post Pet™ was developed by Sony some years ago. It is an email application that was developed with focus on real peoples needs. “Real” people, as opposed to having only businessmen’s as target, and opposed to having engineers finding design solutiona fulfilling mainly other engineers wishes.

One purpose with the design of Post Pet™ was to consider that the essence of one-to-one communication is often an intimate activity. This is neglected by other email applications. For example business letters and love letter have no differences when you send an email, except (hopefully) for the written word.

The creators of Post Pet™ wanted to make an email application where the sender and receiver could express and strengthen their close relation. The program consists of a set of different pets, all with unique personalities and temperaments. The user interface of the program is warm and fuzzy with bright colours and cartoon graphics. The pet you chose to adopt as yours will live in a nicely furnished room and must be carefully taken care of.

When you write a letter you can choose to let the pet or the postman to deliver. Pets can only deliver to others who use Post Pet™ and when you send a email the pet ‘physically’ travels to the recipient’s house leaving the e-mail. If the receiver is online the pet can stay for a while to play around a bit. As a mean to strengthen the intimate correspondence between friends, the pet cannot deliver more than one at the time. Another feature is that the pet has a limited lifetime. The more you use it, the shorter life is has. This further stress the importance you give to a friend that you chose to let the pet deliver to.

Functions which are rarely used in an ordinary email program, e.g. blind carbon copy (Bcc) or filtering are taken away. The emphasis in the design was to create an interface that is appealing and easy to use. The email client became enormously popular (still are!) and can be used for both PC and Ketai (mobile phone).

/Post Pet™ was developed by Kazuhiko Hachiya (media artist), Namie Manabe (graphic designer), and Takashi Kohki (programmer).