A speculation into the 'before' of our sleep journeys, opening up design opportunities and ways into using language as a design tool.

For my final MA project, I worked with fellow student Jess Stein, in collaboration with IKEA of Sweden.

Since 2016, IKEA has led research into current and future sleep value spaces. There has been an uptick in sleep solutions to meet emerging lifestyle trends and changing consumer demand, and we have a better understanding of the links between sleep and wellness. IKEA is interested in how to expand its traditional sleep offering in an evolving sleep market. Through our collaboration, IKEA shared their research with us, but we were otherwise given the freedom to define our own research questions.

What happens when we “go to bed”?

Our work began with a reflection on sleep and anxiety, and recent discussions around the futility of and harm caused by the use of sleep tracking devices and apps. This led to a series of small experiments into the mapping of journeys—how can we talk about, draw, and describe our own sleep in terms other than hours? What happens when we “go to bed”? 

We gathered 20+ hours of user home walkthrough footage over Zoom, creating a visual diary around sleep to explore sequencing, product interactions, and the stories that make up our sleep journeys.

Ways into service design using language and speculative storytelling

Through this project, we also looked to reflect upon ways into service design research using language, semiotics, and history. To test this approach, we developed a set of tools to prototype using language as part of the design process.

We were interested in how to engage designers with extended sleep journeys, as well as how frameworks from semiotics and depictions of sleep within literature and history might encourage expansiveness within sleep design. We then invited responses from product designers, set designers, and textile designers to a set of briefs focused on expanded sleep journeys.

In response, we developed a speculative fictional scenario around a ‘before’ sleep phase—and bioluminescent reaction—known as Rey, drawing from our research into the history of monophasic and polyphasic sleeping patterns. This fictional narrative and structure gave us a place from which to design for the ‘before’, and we designed an IKEA homeware range and catalogue for Rey.

Final Thoughts

In developing our speculation, we felt a pressure to create something futuristic. However what was most generative was looking backwards, at alternative sleep patterns throughout history, as a way into establishing potential constraints. The catalogue was a way of bringing tangibility to our user insights and stories we heard through our research, as well as an exploration of how we might design for sleep outside of the current parameters of sleep design.

This work brought together different threads of interest, namely how to present stories from user research, different ways into a service design project using speculation and historical research, and an interest in semiotics and the signifiers/signified of sleep.

Project Team: Bea Mandelstam and Jess Stein