Sleep is a crucial and underestimated need for the human body. Insufficient and inconsistent sleep influences the quality of sleep, which can affect one’s overall well-being. The goal is to help people recover from insufficient sleep and building a consistent sleep schedule takes time.
This was a collaborative project between a team of three people, during which I was responsible for Benchmarketing, Interaction ideation with sketching, Prototyping, Photographing, Business evaluation.
An intelligent night lamp that replaces your regular bed lamp and reflects your past bedtime routines, adjusting its brightness, color and sound accordingly. It helps people to reflect on their bedtime behaviour by observing their sleep habits over time and providing personalised feedback to help them adjust their routine implicitly.
Nowadays, our average day is packed with activities. Often up to the very last minute before you go to sleep. This can make it difficult for a person to fall asleep, resulting in insufficient sleep and inconsistent bedtime routines. However, sleep is very important for both your physical and mental health, yet many people still underestimate the importance of having a good night’s rest. Current sleep trackers are unable to help, as they are too quick to reward or punish the user, while a slower and broader look at one’s schedule is needed.
Most current sleep trackers focus on data collection—presenting complex graphs and numbers that offer little guidance on improvement. What users truly need is simple, actionable feedback rather than just raw data. This project shifts focus to long-term monitoring, analyzing sleep cycles over extended periods to help users correct patterns implicitly, filling a gap in a market obsessed with short-term rewards and punishments.
Improving sleep consistency takes time, making "Slow Technology" an ideal approach. Instead of intrusive, fast-paced feedback, a slow product observes long-term processes and acts only when meaningful. Designed to blend into the bedroom environment as an aesthetic artifact, it fosters ritualistic interaction and personal attachment, potentially supporting users through different life stages or even connecting multiple people’s sleep patterns.
With limited time and material, low-fi prototypes were made for all three concept with functional interaction. These prototypes were made by paper cutting, ready-made stuffs, origami, and remote light inside to simulate the light changing during users interacting with the prototype. Then, these low-fidelity prototypes were briefly evaluated with participants about what did they feel about the three prototypes and the three corresponding interactions.
Questionnaire gathered insights from 31 young adults (20-30) to understand sleep patterns and pain points. Key findings: Over 80% dislike punishment for bad sleep. Users prefer gradual light, sound, and auto-off features. The ideal experience is described as "calm," "interesting," and "novel."
A form resembling a mix of a campfire and a seashell was selected for its calming aesthetic and bedroom fit. The concept involves users adding 'sticks' (from the outer shell) into the inner layer as fuel to generate light, mimicking feeding a campfire or using incense sticks. The light duration reflects the user's past sleep behavior, applying light in both evening and morning routines.
Morpheus acts as a replacement for your average night lamp, as it is able to adjust its light levels based on long-term personal sleeping performance.
At night, the user adds ‘incense sticks’ to get light for a certain duration, with each stick adding a set amount of time. This slow, ritualistic interaction helps users ‘feel’ the time, calm down from busy days, and reflect on previous nights.
After being turned off for 7 hours, Morpheus activates automatically in the morning with refreshing blue light and tender sound. It nudges users to keep a healthy schedule by changing stick values and light if the schedule is ignored too often.
Example: blue sticks and mountain spring sounds for a cool summer feeling, or orange sticks and campfire sounds for winter warmth. These seasonal modes can be optionally unlocked by purchasing corresponding sticks, offering users customization beyond the basic mode.
