Luisa Ruge

CoFounder Scout9 / PhD in Animal-Computer Interaction

As a product and service designer, tackling a PhD in the computer science department felt strange to Luisa. She was surrounded by people with a traditional computer science background. However, she quite quickly realised a striking advantage she had over others. As a designer, she believes one’s fear of failure is naturally very low. In this department, she was the one who felt most comfortable taking risks.

Nomadic Early Life

Luisa was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She moved to Florida at the age of 5, moving back to Bogotá as a teenager; beginning what she refers to as her “nomadic lifestyle”. While struggling to decide on a specific area of study for college, she visited a friend who was creating fantastic designs using an airbrush. It immediately gripped her interest, and she decided there and then that she would study that which allowed her to use one too: industrial design.

She realised during this time that she was very strong at the creative side of design and less so on the implementation side. She often loved discussing ideas with others at the ground level of product design, where ideas flicker before the candle is lit. Knowing she was gravitating towards research and wanting to pursue further studies, she decided to complete a master’s in Product Design at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Intersection of Expertise

After more than 10 years working in the corporate world, Luisa wished to try something new. She reflected on her childhood fascination and love for animals, but wasn’t sure how to intersect this interest with her skills as a product designer. In parallel with her design career, she trained as a service dog trainer, worked part-time at a dog daycare, and even volunteered to help take care of and train urban search & rescue dogs as well as police dogs. While she enjoyed this thoroughly, it was this intersection between her two areas of expertise that she really wished to pursue.

This intersection would arrive in the form of a PhD program in the UK, where she would focus on designing smart products for assistance dogs. This program was in the Computing & Communications faculty at the Open University. Going back to academia at 40 proved to be quite an adjustment.

However, it was clear to her that she had gained a lot of value from her previous experience. This was experience that her colleagues didn’t have, such as skills in managing projects and discipline, stemming from her years working in a corporate environment, as an independent consultant and within start-ups. She was able to focus her ideas and freely test them without any financial consequences to failure. She believes strongly that this is the result of having spent so much time as a generalist, moving from product to product. She knew a bit about a lot, and had throughout her career worked with many successful and unsuccessful ideas and businesses.

Developing Scout9 & an Animal-Centred Design Lab

Before finishing her PhD, Luisa cofounded Scout9, where she was able to weave together her diverse background and knowledge with her crossover into the world of smart technologies, developing an app with her team which is focused on allowing those taking care of dogs to make better decisions on their pet’s behalf. She believes that there are some things humans are better at and some things computers are better at, incorporating this philosophy into its design. By centering design decisions around the dog’s well-being, she keeps the guide rails around what’s best for the dog. She works in tandem with her co-founder Patrick, a traditional software developer, and finds that each of their skill sets complements the other nicely. 

Most recently, Luisa has taken an advisory role at Scout9 and focused on developing Phauna –an animal-centred design lab – officially launching in early 2022 – where she has assembled a collective of designers and technologists for on-demand collaboration. She is currently working on a project with a veterinary hospital, helping them reimagine what the experience of going to the vet can look like when considering the pet’s perspective.