benzado

ninakix:

Designer Tan Weihao Rios has created this incredibly cute-looking alarm clock, which will allow you to wake up or catch a bit more sleep. DOoP will help you figure out how many hours you’ve slept and how much sleep you’re getting, and how much you actually need. This sleep deficit is problematic for most people, as they become really inefficient due to lack of sleep. The red and green dials on the face will remind you where you are at. They will tell you how much sleep you need. There is also a countdown timer and a night light. DOoP will wake you up with sound and light, engaging more of your senses. (via Apartment Therapy Unplugged)

I tried to find out more information about this clock and discovered it doesn’t exist. Tan Weihao Rios is a fourth year design student, and as far as I can tell he didn’t even build a prototype, just designed a 3D model in a computer. I’m not even sure how much beyond the appearance he has designed, because all of the articles about it cite as their source a blogspot post which doesn’t describe how the clock works at all.

So, what actually does the clock do, and how much of the feature descriptions are projected desires? The idea of tracking your sleep debt, so that you can pay it off in the future, is attractive. For it to work, you would have to be pretty diligent about hitting a button before you go to sleep and after you wake up, and handle cases like forgetting to hit the button, or spending a night away from home. Or what do you do when you get in bed, hit the button, then two hours later find yourself awake and unable to fall asleep? Should there be another button for, “Nevermind, I haven’t actually been sleeping?” Now it’s starting to sound like, in practice, the thing would be too complicated to be useful.

For a product, all of those considerations are part of the design, and whether they have been addressed separates a great product from a mediocre piece of junk. Too many people with Great Ideas haven’t considered all the unpleasant edge cases that a product will have to deal with in the real world. The worst is when those issues are brushed aside as mere details that somebody else will deal with.

But in the details is where the devil hides.