>> Dan Lockton (he/him): Hello, everyone. I'm Dan. We're going to talk today about Sleep
Ecologies: Tools for Snoozy Autoethnography. So, just a little bit of background: I run
something called the Imaginaries Lab and we do Research through Design. We develop methods
to help people understand in new ways, help people imagine new ways of living.
And we kind of make imaginaries tangible through designing new tools. Some of the areas we
looked at through these methods, include personal development, interdisciplinarity,
Mental health,
And kind of more speculative design, design fiction around climate features. We develop
new types of more qualitative interfaces for things like energy use.
We also do a lot of work on tools for facilitation and idea generation. So things like new metaphors,
and even things like, most recently, we’ve been developing methods around Thinking through
Screenwriting as part of a participatory futuring kind of method.
So what we're going to talk about today is around sleep and wellbeing, and this is a
project in collaboration with Philips Design. So our basic research question was, how can
we enable people to explore patterns in their own sleep, energy, and wellness autoethnographically,
through both qualitative and quantitative data?
And so this is the context of this—this is an undergraduate design studio class. Five
students had eight weeks to work on this. The idea is that we treat environments like
physical and digital, and contextual aspects of people's lives beyond sleep itself,
As connected, part of this kind of ecology idea.
And we had a focus on student life and using autoethnography and some more playful self-experimentation,
if you like, within that context. Our initial work was almost investigating what areas to
investigate—which things seem important in these
ecologies around sleep. And so each of the students projects took a different approach,
using technology in different ways: some of them more around sensor data, do things with
quantitative
data; others are more around qualitative aspects or focusing on the physical environment or
digital environment, or combination of both.
So Jackie is now going to introduce his project.
>> Jackie Chou (he/him): What activities do you do before you go to bed that get you in
the mood, get you ready for a night's rest? For me, this kind of stemmed from personal
experience of like when
I do my full skincare routine or when I clean up or tidy up the
mess of things in my room. So each person who has this kind of kit that I created would
tally up the activities that they’d be doing every night before they go to bed. We worked
with Philips on this project and so
I tried to see if I could integrate the kit into their sleep app, that collected sleep
data using this headband that had sensors. So I was interested to see, can you incorporate
the pre-sleep data into
the whole thing, so you get a more holistic view of your night’s rest.
I custom-ordered all these Legos in different colors and shapes. So they would fit perfectly
into my system of points. Brushing our teeth, or like
turning off the lights would be a one-point activity, but if you did things that were
more mindful and intentional about putting yourself in a good place
before bedtime—that would be something like reading a chapter in a book or something like
that, or maybe doing your full 12-step skincare routine,
those would be like three or four. So an obvious question is ‘why couldn't this entire thing
be digital?’ But some of the feedback that I received from people who I tested this with
was like,
having the physical object there, you know, by my bed, or on the living-room table was
really helpful and reminded me to actually think about this and participate. And I think
actually
recently with COVID-19 I think that this is also an interesting thing to think about—it's
almost like the opposite. Now, I think a lot of people are talking about your getting-up
routine. Depending on whether or not they take a shower before 12pm, that kind of
sets the tone, and when it's like the whole day it’s like, ‘Oh, am I gonna be productive
today?’
>> Erin Ryan (she/her): So I was looking at using sleep data either just showed you the
numbers and then you’d would say ”oh, wow, I'm really not sleeping, I should sleep
more.”
I wanted to look into how I can take this data and create a digital experiential landscape.
So giving people something that's very immersive and very rich in detail that reflects the
quality of the sleep they're getting. I was interested in looking at ways
That I could nudge my peers or anyone really to reconsider their sleep and have it be something
that they were thinking about and give them a new way to evaluate their sleeping patterns.
What I did, was called Forest of Sleep where you were able to generate a forest based on
your sleep data. Say you slept super well you would have really
normal looking trees and you’d get this this beautiful forest where the trees that
were very normal. If you weren't sleeping, you’d get these trees which would contort
themselves, they’d be skinnier and the branches would be in strange places.
Lots of little visual cues to prompt you into thinking “what they look like that?” I
was using a Fitbit I had my friends use a cheap Fitbit I had and
Even if they weren't checking it. It was still growing, and it was still there. Not only
are you being presented with your sleep habits, but you're also able to do a little bit of
investigative work on your own.
>> Antonio Song (he/him): It is my pleasure to introduce you to my project Focus Watch,
which is a smart watch, watch face that tracks your focus rate to guide you to a better sleep
schedule.
The idea came to me because I noticed that a lot of college students are pulling a lot
of all nighters, oftentimes, but they're not actually focused when they're doing the all
nighters, they're very distracted.
I did a little research on myself and measured how much I was focusing during my own all
nighter from 12 to 9am turns out I was only focusing for one hour and 22 minutes, the
rest of the time I was on social media or doing something else.
So I thought what rather than pulling an all nighter and getting no sleep to get the work
done, why don't I get seven hours of sleep and do the same amount of work in the morning
within 2.3 hours.
So the idea came to me that if I can measure my focus with Google Chrome history I could
feed that information to my SmartWatch so it can remind me when I'm losing focus
So I came up with a few designs that could mimic my mental state. So it would measure
my focus rate and the visuals would replicate how I'm focusing and it would nudge me to
either go to sleep or refocus on my focus rate. Thank you.
>> Tammar Zea-Wolfson (she/her): I became interested in time and how that related to
sleep, particularly sleep planning.
And the way I did that was to develop a couple of probes to give to fellow students. They
had a spinning acrylic desk, and you can see on the bottom left hand, there's a potentiometer
That allowed them to adjust the rate of spinning and then they used dry erase markers to annotate
however they wanted to.
I left it open ended because actually, what I was more curious about is how they would
use these ambiguous tools
The only thing I told them was “This might be a model of time” and then I showed them
how to use it. So when I got these back. I had little notebooks that had journal entries
As well as the annotations on the disks. What was the most interesting coming out of this
research is that it created a moment for them to experience time in a more expansive way.
That by interacting with these devices they felt like they were “chilling out” or
relaxing and giving themselves permission to experience time that wasn't rushed or stressful.
The next phase of the project involved an aesthetic model on the wall.
Of what this object might look like in the home or office environment. And then on the
table top was a working model. The idea was again a rotating disk created an audio sound
to remind you to attend to something. You could set it for a week, a month, or a whole
season to daily remind you, at a certain time.
And what time it was going to remind you, and what it was reminding you of was entirely
up to the person using it. During our show one of the things that
people reflected on is feeling like there weren't really ways to remind ourselves in
a non-invasive way of daily practices that we want to attend to.
CJ Walsh was investigating sleeping habits among college students, particularly when
they were sleeping in nontraditional spaces and how he might design artifacts that could
support them in those choices, because he didn't see this as a problem necessarily to
be fixed.
He actually wanted to support people in their choices to sleep, where they found themselves.
>> Erin Ryan (she/her): As part of his research CJ took photos of students sleeping in unconventional
places and then they (the students) annotated those photos to talk about why they chose
a particular place, what parts of their body experienced discomfort.
Versus what about those places that they'd chosen were providing comfort and providing
support.
>> Jackie Chou (he/him): He also talked about the social aspects of napping in these spaces.
Like “do feel comfortable, am I gonna get worried about my stuff being stolen, or do
I feel embarrassed to be napping here?”
>> Tammar Zea-Wolfson (she/her): And then in the next phase he provided materials for
people to augment their chosen napping spaces, either to make themselves physically more
comfortable or possibly socially more comfortable. And I think that
And I think that is part of what he was reflecting on in his project, exactly what you said Jackie,
a combination of physical but also social element of sleeping in non-traditional places.
So, coming out of these projects, and out of the paper, we think there's a lot of really
interesting opportunity for self-inquiry tools as a direction for
Research through Design, but also designers working together as a cohort to address different
aspects of a problem space, and how these combined autoethnographic probes or suites
of probes might work together.
>> Dan Lockton (he/him): There were a number of other insights and issues that arose as
well, but we have more details of those in the paper. Thank you.
>> Tammar Zea-Wolfson (she/her): Thanks.