night night . みんな
Let’s all get some sleep!
Several years ago while studying Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art I decided to undertake an experiment to try and optimize my happiness.
Over the course of that next year I worked to design every aspect of my life for happiness, from my breathing, to my eating and exercise, my sleep, my material possessions, and even my relationships. It proved a life changing experience and many of the habits I developed over that time have stayed with me.
People often ask me to tell them “what was the one thing” that had the biggest impact on my happiness. I actually found that everything I did impacted my happiness in some way, but when really pressed I tell people to look at their sleep.
Sleep has a huge impact on our health, wellbeing, and happiness. After just one night of missed sleep you perform cognitively as if intoxicated, and the cumulative impact over time is ugly. One third of Americans don’t get enough sleep, and this lack of sleep is associated with increased stress and depression, hypertension, heart and kidney disease, motor vehicle accidents and suicide.
One of the best things you can do to improve your life is simply get enough sleep. I’m serious. Go to sleep! It’s awesome!
There are many reasons why getting enough sleep is difficult, it’s a complex issue. Our modern behaviors, beliefs, and culture relating to sleep are generally pretty unsupportive. Furthermore the world we live in isn’t designed for sleep. Artificial lights, sound, food, schedules, mobile devices, social activities, etc., all often fail to support healthy sleep habits.
A significant change is needed in the design of all of these elements of our lives, but today I’m going to focus on just one small step what we can each take to improve the health, wellbeing, and happiness of the people around us.
Meet night night . みんな
night night everyone is a simple program that puts your website to sleep, encouraging your website visitor’s to go to bed.
night night allows your website to run normally throughout the day. Then, looking at the time on your website visitor’s computer, it will put the website to sleep at bedtime. Because night night takes into account the individual’s time, it will work anywhere in the world and in any time zone.
night night also lets users continue on to the site if they have something they just can’t wait for, but the simple prompt aims to remind people of the trade-off between the value of the what they are doing online and the sleep they could be having.
Get the code for your site at http://nightnight.みんな
Several people have asked “why don’t you just make it a browser extension so that people could control it on their own?” That is still a possibility in the future, and we imagine additional tools for mobile apps, etc., but the real answer is that we want to shift the responsibility for sleep away from the user of the website and on to the designer of the website.
Why would I put my website to sleep?
As technology creators we build tools that delight, engage, and generally optimize for profit. Unfortunately, sometimes the “success” of the experiences we create can also hurt the people that use them, negatively impacting other aspects of their lives, like their focus, finances, relationships, or health.
One example of these negative impacts is when our websites get in the way of people’s sleep. An addictive website might be brilliant for your bottom line, but can be a disaster for the circadian rhythms of others. By choosing to put your website to sleep at bedtime and encouraging your users to go to bed, you are better supporting their health, wellbeing, and happiness. You are caring about them and putting their needs first.
By taking universal responsibility for the effect of your website on others, you are taking a small but important step to improve the world we live in.
Universal Responsibility
Universal responsibility is the idea that as designers and technology creators we must take responsibility for ALL of the outcomes of our creations. We have a responsibility to create great product experiences for people, but we also have a responsibility to care for their general wellbeing, health, and happiness. We must care for them enough to help them step away from our product and get a good night’s sleep.
Universal responsibility is one approach advocated by New Kind of Design.
So what is next?
We’ll continue to develop the night night tool and expand its ease of use and available platforms in the coming months, so stay tuned, and we’d love your ideas and feedback. But for us we are really excited to have night night start a meaningful conversation about our responsibility as technology creators to care in a radically more holistic way for the people who use our services.
We call on technology leaders to join the conversation and take tangible steps to improve the world’s sleep. So what say you Mark Zuckerberg? Arianna Huffington (Thank you for your sleep advocacy!)? Jack Dorsey, Ev Williams and Biz Stone? Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp? Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger? Stewart Butterfield? Others? What is our responsibility to help the world sleep better? Could we put our websites and apps to bed to help our users sleep?
So get some sleep, help your loved ones get some sleep, and drop night night into your website to help everyone get more sleep.
J. Paul Neeley is a Service and Speculative Designer based in London, and is the creator of nightnight.みんな. Special thank you to Håkon Eide who lead development on the project, and to the teams at mmsz.co and neeleyworldwide.com for their thinking and support.
Learn more and get the code for your site at http://nightnight.みんな
And follow J. Paul on Twitter to join the conversation.
