Solis: Optimizing the Dorm Environment for Sleep

We don’t talk enough about sleep. Getting enough sleep is essential to good health; insufficient sleep has been linked to whole host of chronic diseases, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma and depression. Back in the 1960s, 2% of Americans got 6 hours of sleep per night or less; today that number is 33%.

Sleep is tricky because it is both an intentional behavior (going to bed) and an outcome (falling and staying asleep). It can be affected by our behaviors through the day: early exposure to daylight can hero sync circadian rhythms, physical activity can make us tired, and caffeine too late in the day can keep us up. It can be affected by stress and our states of mind: it’s hard to fall asleep if you can’t settle your mind. It can be affected by our environments: the lights and sounds that surround us, the temperature of our bedroom and the comfort of our beds all play a role. And it can also be affected by the activities, such as watching television, using social media and playing games, that engage us and cut into our sleep.

So what if we felt sleep were important enough to intervene more directly? To craft environments that would set us up for better sleep. At Building H, we teamed up with designer Elliott Wortham to challenge a team of undergraduate students in the Human-Centered Design and Engineering department at the University of Washington to envision such an approach. After digging into the issue, they came up with Solis, a speculative design of a service that would help future college students get healthy sleep.