Designing Dilbert's New Digs

When Scott Adams considered matrimony for the star of his comic strip Dilbert, the cartoonist felt a new house might help to cinch the deal for his luckless hero. A home remarkable enough to inspire a woman to look past Dilbert's obvious shortcomings. In other words, wife bait.

Now Dilbert's Ultimate House (also known as DUH) has been constructed at http://www.dilbert.com/. The new "eco-friendly, energy-efficient, functional" digs were designed by 3-D animation and multimedia company Heartwood Studios, cofounded by Neil Wadhawan, BA'04.

Heartwood, which has offices in Boston and San Francisco, finished the online house in October. Since then, numerous well-wishers have dropped by for a virtual tour. Fans of Dilbert even had a hand in the house's plan. "In drawing up the blueprints," says Wadhawan, the firm's director of services, "the 3-D team, the web team, and the creative director looked at three thousand e-mailed suggestions."

Which explains why, besides being technologically edgy, Dilbert's home boasts a vacuum robot, a hoseable kids' bathroom with a drain in the floor, an underground basketball court, two dishwashers (one to hold clean dishes, the other to wash dirty dishes), and a closet with multiple sets of the same outfit.

In addition to building cartoon characters' homes, Heartwood ó whose website is at http://www.hwd3d.com/ ó creates other high-end 3-D animations: product models, renderings of buildings, and re-creations used in court to help construct scenes for a jury. It also shows companies how to use 3-D animations for training, marketing, and R&D purposes.

Wadhawan, whose family came to Canada from India in the 1950s, offers co-op opportunities at the Heartwood Studio in Boston to current Northeastern students. "There's a lot of entrepreneurial spirit in my family, and a lot of people contributed to my success," he says. "Providing co-op is a way to help groom young entrepreneurs. And to be able to pay it back to NU and the community."

— Katy Kramer, MA’00