Forest of Sleep
Spring 2019 - Game design, research, UI/UXThe Forest of Sleep is a data-enabled virtual environment that takes your Fitbit sleep data and generates a digital forest in which the form of the trees in influenced by the amount and quality of sleep you’re getting. By transforming sleep data into a digital landscape with trees that change in bizarre and complex ways in line with your sleep patterns, this digital forest looks to nudge people to reprioritize their sleep by drawing attention to one’s sleep habits and patterns.
By creating a landscape with no set end points - the forest will never stop growing, this experience is non judgemental, and will be something users can come back to even after a period without using it. Often the terms we use to describe our sleep are very vague. By comparing your forest to someone else, more fruitful conversations about sleep and wellness can be had using meaningful data visualizations.
Enter your forest to see and move around the trees generated by your sleep data from the past week, taken from your Fitbit. Continued use and the input of more qualitative data surrounding your sleep, such as adherence to routines or abstaining from things that will negatively impact your sleep, like coffee, generate new environmental aspects for your forest, like sound, and other forms of life like birds or new plants.
Move to a new scene in the experience, where you can see your average tree and the data that generated it. Using sliders, you can see how getting more or less sleep would impact the form of your tree. Through this users are nudged to improve their habits on timescales larger than a day — what would your forest look like if you got thirty more minutes of sleep each night this week? What about an hour?
You can read more about my process on Medium.