What an alarm clock can teach us about online collaboration
For centuries, people have relied on early morning alarms to get them out of bed and to work. As a rule they are simple and effective in waking up without fail and helping us prepare for the day ahead. But the technology industry has changed the way we approach our jobs, pushing back the start time of work from 9am to 10am or even later into the evening.
And if you’re old school like me, that means you’re no longer waking up at 6am - 7am as your alarm clock would have done for much of your life. Unfortunately this new time arrangement can also be clunky for those who still find it difficult in setting an alarm.
What if you could use a piece of technology to get the same results? Say, a smart-button/touchpad kind of thingie that would allow you to wake up on a specific, pre-set time or in response to some other trigger.
What if it could even be set up to wake you up with the right music? Wouldn’t that sound great?
This is what I discovered when I partnered with a group of developers and researchers from UC Berkeley , UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara on an idea called SleepforGood. For the past year we have been developing technologies for this project at The Simple Group .
So what is SleepforGood?
The SleepforGood Project is a concept designed to help people established in digital work culture wake up at the right time and be more productive in their digital work. This could be their first day on the job, or like me, the start of a new project with a group of new co-workers and clients. In our case we are aiming to motivate people to wake up at 7am (in a sense leading from the discovery that people are indeed happier when they wake up earlier) and be productive without being intrusive.
The basic idea for this project is that you would set up a hardware device that you would use as an alarm clock. The clock would be set to wake you up at a specific time each morning, and the hardware device would also be connected to your phone, tablet and/or laptop, allowing you to use SleepforGood as a visual alarm clock. The alarm will sound through your phone/tablet (with integrated speaker/music player) or your computer over the same sound card that is being used for audio.
Figure 1. The basic idea for this project is that you would set up a hardware device that you would use as an alarm clock.
The device could also be set to wake up in response to other triggers like:
- SMS text message: Wake up when you receive an SMS text message at the appointed time.
- Motion detector: Wake up when movement is detected in your room
- Location detection: Wake up when you move into a specific location (like your office)
- Social media: wake up when any of your social networks have activity at the appointed time.
- Web push notification wake up when you receive new email or messages on any web service.
- Time of day triggers: Wake up at pre-set times each morning, or change them throughout the month - the possibilities are endless.
In addition, the alarm clock would be mains powered and independent from other devices like your mobile phone. This means that it will operate independently of the network, so if you switch off your phone and keep the alarm clock powered up, it will continue to show the right time until you either turn it off or manually reset it.
This might not be as simple an idea as one might think. Yes, a lot of people are already using alarm clocks in this way, but they are usually filled with buttons and levers that allow you to adjust them manually based on some pre-determined schedule like waking up at certain times throughout the day.
That’s why we decided to use a touch screen interface instead. Firstly you tap the screen to set the time and then you tap the screen again when you want to wake up – that’s it!
Figure 2. The touch screen interface allows you to simply wake up at any time by tapping your screen.
We decided to use a touch screen based alarm clock because it has the additional benefit of being scalable in size. Those who have used alarm clocks can tell you that they usually have a small button (like a push button) in the middle of the touch screen on top of which are buttons for setting the time and turning off/on the alarm.
The buttons go a long way in adding to the overall bulk of the device. For us, we wanted to make sure that the device would fit on your bedside table and could easily be used as an everyday alarm clock for those who want one. Therefore, we simplified the interface and decided to use touch as one of our major interaction methods.
Tapping on the top of the clock will turn it on and off, while tapping at the bottom will set it to a specific time. We also added a software Sleep mode trigger – for those who want their alarm clock to act as a regular alarm. When you tap the bottom of the touch screen, the alarm is turned off and receives no further interaction from its users during the day.
Figure 3. In addition we placed a software sleep mode trigger at the bottom of the screen to quickly silence your alarm clock.
Once your dependencies are set up, you can wake up at any time simply by tapping on your screen (see figure 2). You can select to wake up when an SMS message arrives or when movement is detected in your room. You can also set it to wake up when you arrive at work and then switch it off when you leave – that’s pretty cool!
Figure 4. This is what the device could look like when you receive it.
Along with an alarm clock, the device also includes a battery that charges your phone, a music player and microphone. This way we can use the alarm clock to wake you up with wireless audio and then use those same connections to listen to music while at work.
To set up the alarm clock, all you need is an Internet connection and a web browser (running on your laptop/desktop). In addition to setting up the alarms and other triggers, we also created some visual updates for iOS and Android devices so that users will get a better idea how their information will be used by our visual interface. We plan on releasing more updates for both platforms as time goes on.
Conclusion
The SleepforGood project is a proof of concept experiment. We have found that the above mentioned concept works well enough to function as an alarm clock and we have demonstrated that you wake up feeling happier when you do so. However, we have not yet implemented the testing, calibration or user experience of the software to ensure that it has been properly developed and tested.
In addition, we had to create a number of new dependencies (such as our webpage on your mobile phone, SMS message triggering and other triggers) which are, in many ways, more complex than the alarm sounds themselves.