9/1 What is healthy family sleep?

Myriad solutions exist to help people sleep better. From medication to breathing devices, self help books to apps, hypnosis to psychological counseling — these solutions serve a range of functions from enhancing quality of sleep to treating medical conditions to establishing healthy sleep routines and patterns. Some solutions require the intervention of a professional, while others are self-guided and administered.

The interesting thing to note, however, is that most of these solutions are designed to serve an individual. But what happens when you consider sleep within the context of a family? How do different family structures influence needs and desires when it comes to sleep? How might technology take into account these broader contextual and familial issues?

These are the questions we will be asking over the next few weeks, starting with narrowing in on what it means to sleep within the context of family. To begin, we will be considering some of the following questions in detail before conceiving of a design solution:

1. What is the family unit we are designing for? What are their unique needs when it comes to sleep?
2. What does healthy sleep look like within the context of this specific family unit?
3. What type of transitions or life events might trigger a need for sleep solutions? What other needs might be associated with these transitions?
4. What channels/ technologies are most appropriate for these specific stakeholders? How do they want to be reached? How might different family members need to be reached differently?
5. How might a technological solution fit within an established family sleep dynamic? What does the service ecosystem surrounding this product look like?

From this line of questioning, I’ve considered three audiences that might be interesting to consider:

1. Traveling parents with children — involving them in a regular bedtime routine.
2. Graduate students with partners — coordinating sleep patterns to ensure quality time together.
3. Living abroad — navigating the time difference with family members and the challenges this poses for coordinated sleep and communication.

After a brainstorming session on 9/2, we arrived at final categories for consideration:

1. New families and postpartum depression
2. Traveling/working parents and child’s bedtime routine
3. Sleep of elderly parents/ relatives — in home or away (potentially involving overnight hospital stays)
4. Sleeping with roommates in college dorms

As a group, we settled on traveling/working parents and child’s bedtime routine as the family unit we wanted to examine further for our design solution.