Ode to Sleep — Simple Product Design

11 min readJun 14, 2021

Prashant Swaroop,
Industrial Design Student,
Nation Institute of Design Andra Pradesh.

This blog is made to document the entire design process which I went through in a span of 8 weeks.

What is a simple product? ….you might ask, what makes a simple product? other might and what spectrum are we using to evaluate whether it’s a simple product or a complex one

To answer all these questions let’s imagine a situation -

It's 3 am and you are really exhausted from work you drop on your bed and within a few seconds, your alarm starts to buzz. Its already 8 am, you drag yourself out of the bed enter into your washroom splash water on your face extend your arm to grab your toothbrush, however, you are presented with 2 options as shown below -

You are disorganized, you don't know which one you should use, let me help you to gain some clarity…

Let us talk about brush a - Simple form, a rather straightforward-looking brush, focused on primary function i.e to clean the teeth.

Now brush b - a little developed form, electric brush with a lot more secondary features such as different cleaning mode, premium finish, etc.

While this might have or haven’t helped you to choose the right brush but most definitely your expectations from brush b would be much higher when compared to that of brush a. Why is that? Did brush a fail to fulfill the primary need?

Well no, but the answer is rather candid.. with every new addition of a feature or a simple change in the form of a standardized product the perceived expectation of the product changes, this perceived expectation could be used as a way to identify the complexity in the product, however, there is on said spectrum in which you can place your product to recognize the complexities of it, but you can gauge the same by pinpointing as to what is expected out of your product and if the list is endless, chances are you’re dealing with a rather complex product.

Now, let's talk about the course

Finding Domain

On the first day, we were asked to collect some products. Products that spark curiosity in us and later based on the products we choose, we were given some keys words that we could use to build our chain of thought.

The keyword given to me were -

Body double
User-Centric
Lifestyle oriented

After a quite bit of discussion with the faculty, the keywords started to resonate with me, I become comfortable with the idea of a product being an extension of one’s identity and choices, of the idea that each product paints a narrative which the user might be telling.

After more back and forth with my batchmates I started to develop few ideas as to where I want to take my design process, at this stage it was pretty clear that I want to begin from the user, much research later I stumbled upon Inclusive Design, although inclusive design does go a little out of the scope of this SPD however, I would like to share few insights.

Inclusive Design at its core starts with identifying the full range of human diversity, all the while keeping our biases and abilities aside. It includes learnings and perspectives of a range of people and since it starts with the users' abilities the outcome which comes out of it enables the user to appreciate the product even more.

Some of the core principles of Inclusive Design

Getting back to the point.

What is body double?

The idea is that — each product is perceived as having an ‘ identity ’ and that the user can associate themselves with the individual identity of the products they own. This perception of identity is usually created by brands through visual design elements. These visual elements are often referred to as styling, which in reality is a physical interpretation of identity, hence it is tangible in nature.

Taking the idea forward I began my research by building up a user context for which I developed few personalities. (as below)

Above are few user personas which I ended up with.

After making my user personas I gained a bit more clarity as to where my domain is heading, what kind of users I am looking at, and what sort of activities they perform, and where I could possibly intervene and take my project forward.

Week 2

Finding Brief

Sound easy right? Well if you think driving at the speed of 150 kmph on a road that is filled with potholes, and each pothole has its own pothole. And each pothole has its own pothole, and each pothole has its own pothole, is easy? — then you might be onto something.

However, to help us navigate through such potholes we did the “A.E.I.O.U” analysis

What is A.E.I.O.U?

(A)ctivity - What do people do?
(E)nvrioment - What/How is the space around them?
(I)teraction - What is the relation between object-people, object-object?
(O)bject - What are the products people have in their environment
(U)ser - Who is ‘their’ and how do they behave in the environment.

Below are some brief which I ended up with -

But what happened to the user persona which you were earlier talking about? You might wonder.

Well, that is what was lacking in my above-defined brief to connect the two, I did “a day in life” for one of my personas.

I tried to find patterns in the activities my user were performing through which, I made connections to identify such areas where I can intervene.

And with that, I landed upon my shortlisted briefs -

Initial Brief -

How might we design a product which can help people relax and assist them to sleep after they have spent their whole day looking at a screen?

Week 3

Research Phase I

I began my research by looking at how and where a screen is being used throughout the day.

To understand the effects of screen time on the sleep schedule I tried to construct few questions which I could address to a bigger audience.

Key Insights from the survey —

Few people mentioned that they usually wake up more refreshed and peaceful on days when they had not used any gadgets on the previous nights.
People usually get anxious or bored while trying to sleep and hence end up looking at youtube videos or social media in order to calm them down and sleep with no worries.
Few older people mentioned that they usually feel sleepy while looking at the screen but as soon as they hit the bed it takes them 20–30 minutes to sleep which in turn affects the quality of their sleep.
White noise/relaxing music helped a few people to reduce their screen time right before bed and to sleep more peacefully.
Few people mentioned that if they miss their sleeping time, they end up spending more time on screen and hence completely ruining their sleep cycle.

Few patterns I noticed from the survey —

80% of people mentioned that they get an adequate amount of sleep but 40% of people mentioned at they rarely wake up well the next day.
Close to 40% of people mentioned that they were likely to doze off while working on a task that requires focus.
77% of people slept with all the lights off and close to 85% of people had their smartphone on, hence all the more disrupting circadian rhythms which can also trigger insomnia.
Most of the people showed that they have a tendency to actively look at the scene rather than being on a call, and people who were on the call ended up double screening most of the time.

To take my research forward I started with studying how sleep can be induced

Cognitive Exercise -

Inspiration for the product.

Mindfulness -

Imagine you’re stuck in traffic, your car is not moving an inch, you can’t get past the idea that you have to reach your office in the next 20 minutes. Your brother is sitting behind yelling at you for not listening to him about the new album his rock band is working on, while people behind your car are honking like there’s is no tomorrow, there is sweat on your face even though the a.c is on, your phone starts to ring — it’s a call from the office, you pick it up. Your boss yells at you for 5 mins, you keep the phone down. The car in front of you moves an inch and stops…people are still honking, your brother starts yelling about his rock music, your eyes start to feel heavy, your mind feels restless. And then you hear a notification from your phone reminding you to breathe.

It says

Breathe in through your nose for -

Breathe out through your mouth for -

And all of a sudden you’re not overwhelmed anymore, you are now fully aware of where you are, and what you’re doing. You flow through the traffic all the while listening to your brother without losing the sense of the present and each following task seems less laborious, you stop obsessing over your to-do list all the while navigating through them with finesse.

Counting Sheep -

Counting sheep is a mental exercise used in some context as a means of putting oneself to sleep. It involves closing your eyes and imagining a never-ending line of identical white sheep leaping over a fence. As you count each sheep as it jumps over the fence, your mind is supposed to gradually slip into boredom and eventually sleep.

Counting sheep is closely based on the principle of -

“Many busy people are not sleep-deprived, they’re play-deprived.”

mySleepButton is a sleep onset concept that is designed to put the user's mind in a sleep-inducing state. This app takes the idea of counting sheep and puts it in a context where the user would not get frustrated while using this technique to fall asleep.

Autogenic Training -

4–7–8 Breathing technique.

Cardiac Coherence.

Benchmarking -

Taking these abstract ideas forward I started looking at parallel products which could possibly satisfy my brief

After much market study, I tried to prioritize and study the intention of people who use technology just in the hours before bed. Based on my findings I then tried to filter my user group by putting them on a spectrum where product intervention could be possible.

Once the group of the users was identified. I began to conduct a detailed interview in order to pinpoint in what ways a product could assist my user group and help them disconnect from technology.

Over here the abstract ideas which we talked about earlier started to formulate into the features of my product. Finally, the form of the product started to shape up in my head.

Product features based on user feedback.

Ideation -

Here things started to get a bit interesting. The research finally started to take a shape of a product, something which might be tangible. A whole lot of concepts and ideas didn't even see the light of the day (yep! they were bad or impossible) my main struggle in this process was not that I lacked ideas but rather how could I bring something which is metaphysical and highly individual into a product which is neither of those.

Below are some of my concepts -

After much discussion with my faculty, I decided to further refine ‘concept 6’ which was based on kresling based origami and cardiac coherence. To give it context I gave it a form of a night lamp.

Well, this is where the lack of workshop and materials to make proper physical prototypes became apparent. Considering the context in which we are I decided to move forward with discernible friction.

Mockup and Prototyping

After figuring out how the paper is supposed to be folded, at what all angle the form would compress properly I started to make quick prototypes made out of copier paper.

The first prototype had a decagonal form, the smaller form also provided it a recoil. However, this form has a bit of rotation to it which gave it an undesirable complexity.

In the second prototype, I tried to lose the rotational motion by giving the form a 2nd layer of folds which resolved the issue but with 2 layers of fold, the decagonal form started to look a bit stretched.

I tried to resolve the form into a hexagonal shape and started to think about how the mechanism would be placed inside the product. And due to the bigger dimension of the form, the recoil the previous prototype had was lost.

The fourth prototype had two layers of folds, a hexagonal form, and a mechanism based on traveling nut actuator which would be installed in the stem of the product.

In order to figure out the internal mechanism, I decided to make a digit sketch

Piston based mechanism
Traveling nut Mechanism

After much internal self loath I decided to go forward with the Traveling nut mechanism

Final Form of the Product

At this stage, all the internals were figured out what’s left was the overall form of the product.

After a bit of discussion, I realized I can't really have the mechanism at the top of my product and the base has to be big enough such that the electronic could seamlessly fit in my product. Hence I decided to go ahead with a cylindrical base. A classic example of “Form follows function”.

Conclusion

Final Poster — showcasing my product and how the product works.

This marks the end of 8 weeks that was spent while making this product, some refinements are truly necessary, user feedback is still needed to be looked into, but as always —

The design process never really ends, it only halts momentarily.