Somnia: a sleeping enhancement device for remote couples
January 16, 2010Last year, after 11 weeks of work, my group (Tomaso Scherini, Toon van Craenendonck, Wenzhu Zou, and me) finished our design case. It was a great experience, in a fast pace, but full of fun as we always wanted to have. The final concept is Somnia. It was conceived to support the sense of presence between remote couples. After a deep user-research phase, brainstorms, user evaluation and prototypes, we came up with the final idea. Somnia is composed of two pillows and two necklaces. The necklace indicates when the remote partner goes to bed. Once one of the two partners is in bed, the pillow on the other side heats up. This concept leverages warmth to convey presence, and leverages the persuasive principle of consensus – people do as others do – to shift sleep onset. When one of the partners goes to bed, this signal could encourage the other to go to bed as well.
Given the short time we had, we could only run an experiment with 2 couples. The results from that experiment are limited, but an on-line survey we run gave us very good findings. Qualitative feedback showed that Somnia succeeds in providing a sense of connectedness with ones partner when sleeping remotely. This sense of connectedness might lead to a more pleasant sleeping experience. However, a longitudinal quantitative evaluation is necessary to further support the qualitative conclusions.
We have just submitted a short paper to CHI 2010. We are waiting for the result and hoping we will be able to develop this idea further. This is also a good opportunity to thank Maurits Kaptein for his support, supervision, and availability all the time, Boris de Ruyter, and Panos Markopoulos for their feed-back and criticism.
[...] User-centered thoughts thoughts from a user-centered professional « Change by Design DIS’10 here we go! July 13, 2010 Tomaso Scherini, Toon van Craenendonck, Wenzhu Zou, Maurits Kaptein, and I got our paper accepted at DIS’10. Our paper is entitled Enhancing the Sleeping Quality of Partners Living Apart and describes the design case we carried out last year as part of USI program. I mentioned our design case in a previous post. [...]
[...] User-centered thoughts thoughts from a user-centered professional « Change by Design DIS’10 here we go! July 13, 2010 Tomaso Scherini, Toon van Craenendonck, Wenzhu Zou, Maurits Kaptein, and I got our paper accepted at DIS’10. Our paper is entitled Enhancing the Sleeping Quality of Partners Living Apart and describes the design case we carried out last year as part of USI program. I mentioned our design case in a previous post. [...]