Designing for Extreme Sleepers: Rethinking the Rhythms of Sleep Technology
Kasper Karlgren, Donald McMillan · 2022
Sleep takes one-third of our life and is of increasing technological interest. Yet development has been focused on the traditional notion of 8 hours-per-night schedules of ‘good sleep’ – overlooking the varied nature of people’s sleeping and waking practices. Based on the experiences of Shift Workers, Gamers, and Polyphasic Sleepers, this paper exposes the sleep practices of extreme sleepers for the design of technology. This cohort follows sleep patterns outwith those encoded in current technology for work, will and well-being. Through interviews and design workshops, we present three themes emerging from these perspectives on sleep. These themes revolve around the physiological, felt, and social timings of sleep. We explore a design space around these themes through eight different critical design exemplars. In conclusion, this work encourages the design of sleep technology focusing on users’ agency over their own life-rhythms rather than pre-built concepts of ‘good’ sleep.