Bell-a-Notte

red dot
red dot award: design concept 2007

design:

Lunar Design

In-house design:

Jeff Salazar, Lea Kobeli

Bell-a-Notte is an alarm clock/light designed to help one fall asleep and wake up naturally and pleasantly via intuitive interaction.

Bell-a-Notte hangs as a reading light over the bed. It has a clock face that is readable while looking up from a sleeping position. It employs a clapper (the striking element in a bell) control as its primary interface. The clapper control is pulled to set the amount of time desired before the light fades away when the user goes to sleep, and is pulled again in the morning for the amount of time desired to snooze into wakefulness with gradually increasing levels of pleasant sounds and light. Bell-a-Notte allows the user to choose their “go-to-sleep” and “wake-up” routines intuitively and naturally.

The process of waking up is a matter of personal preference for the user, depending on day-to-day variations of mood as well as the amounts of time spent sleeping. Typical alarm clocks require the user to reach out awkwardly or sit up in bed to set it or turn it off. For many, going to sleep and waking up can be an abrupt process. The solution is to find a more natural and intuitive way of assisting the processes of falling asleep and waking up.

A key strength of the design is its ability to make the user react to it almost intuitively. This is achieved by combining the formal expression of a bell with an analogue relationship to time (the clapper control) in order to control its light and sound. The formal expression of the bell makes the product’s function obvious and the clapper control invites the user to set the amount of time the user wants the light to last or the time the user wants to snooze simply by pulling it. The length of the retracting clapper correlates to the amount of time before the light goes off, or the amount of time before the next snooze alarm rings.