Creating a pleasant tactile waking up experience

Abstract

Before you starting read this report, I would like to ask you to take a moment to recall how you experienced your wake-up process this morning. Did you enjoy the moment? Were you dreaming before that moment? Did you feel delight, pleasant or just sad and depressed? How did you wake up? Were you still sleepy or fully wake up then? Were you in hurry or still lazy? What did you do to make sure that you won’t be late for work this morning? Were you waked up at the right moment? Is it different from yesterday? How about the weather? Was there sun shine? How do you feel your wake-up experience? How would you like it to be? Look, your personal waking up experience is determined by a series details and factors relating to the time, the context and your mental status etc. Everyone has its own waking up experience every morning. But lots people indicate that their waking up experiences are not always pleasant. For example, an alarm clock disturbed you from a deep sleep. Unexpected noise forced you to wake up much earlier than usual. Or a dark morning may lead you to oversleep and mess up your morning schedule. All of these are bad waking up experiences. Unpleasant wake-up experiences may result in drowsiness or inability to concentrate during the day. Most people would rather like a pleasant vigorous and refreshed wake-up experience to start their new working day. So how do we make change of this problem? Lots of surveys indicate that lots of people, especially those college students or office workers who need to be punctual in the morning, have very limited knowledge and wrong beliefs about what sleep is and how we wake up. For most of them, an alarm clock is a must in the morning and to some extent, the alarm clock helps them adapt to their highly organized life. On the other hand, an alarm clock may disrupt their natural waking up system and do harm to their health. 1.1 PROJECT GOAL As more and more people came to realize that a pleasant waking up experience could benefits their wellbeing and working status during the day. It becomes necessary to improve people’s waking up quality and find a way to create a pleasant waking up experience. In this project, we will apply tactile stimuli into a waking up context to help people to improve their waking up quality. To achieve this goal, Philips Research, one of the world's largest corporate research organizations, will focus on people’s experience, what drives people, what dilemmas consumers face, and how we can help them in the best possible way to enjoy a healthy, refreshed, energetic and pleasant waking up experience by applying proper tactile stimuli into morning wake-up context. In this project, first step, in order to have more deep understanding and knowledge of this topic, I had a literature study about people’s sleep and wake up. After that, mean to extract qualitative data from the waking up context, a 2 weeks duration context research which involved 18 participants has been conducted. Then, we had a group session with 6 participants whom participated the context mapping. In order to make the participants to express their own waking up insights and tactile experience, we used collage as a method to make the session. After the session, several end user insights were formulated based on the participants’ own wake-up experience. Then a new design vision of a pleasant wake-up experience was developed based on end user insights and the scientific insights about wake up experience which developed from the literature study. This vision is as the following: Using proper tactile stimuli to eventually make one fully awaken (energetic, bright, alert etc.), one needs to go through the process of waking up that involves body and mind, this process need to be taken care of. Therefore the user needs to be aware of. Considering this design vision as a start point of concepts development, I start exploring design directions and generating ideas. Then several product concepts were developed from these ideas. Finally a concept was chosen by using a method named matrix in making a design decision. Finally, a prototype evaluation is completed in a sleep lab of Philips. During the test, 5 participants were involved in a series tests and an after action interview was also completed for each participant. Finally, the results of evaluation experiment will be given and we will provide directions for the future design and further research. 1.2 RESULTS By analyzing the data of the research, a new design vision is formulated as I mentioned above: Using proper tactile stimuli to eventually make one fully awaken (energetic, bright, alert etc.), one needs to go through the process of waking up that involves body and mind, the user needs to be aware of this process. A design concept which applying vibration effects on people’s body that wakes people up at the right moment was developed. After a concept evaluation test, we got lots of feedback which could be used for improving the current concept and formulate the future design direction. For example, applying tactile stimuli in people’s waking up context can efficiently wake people’s body up as well as wake their mind up in the morning. In this report we will communicate the knowledge of sleep and wake up. And the process of the whole project will be described. The methods we applied in context research, designing and evaluation will also be described and discussed.