Conceptual Design

You wake up, groggy, and hit that snooze button. When you do, the digital clock face snaps from showing the time to showing 00:00, while ambient lighting on the device lightly starts glowing. The device pulls a randomized data stream about an event in the world that has a count (e.g. number of birds migrating north, births in an area, packages delivered). This data stream becomes a count, and each time an occurrence happens (e.g. each time someone is born in an area) the counter goes up by 1 (00:01, 00:02, 00:03), accompanied by a subtle pulse of light. The person waking up thus connects the extra minutes they spend in bed to wonderfully-random events happening in the world; in real-time. The nature of counting forward brings the person waking up to encounter more instances of these events the longer they stay in bed, hopefully motivating a headspace that is conducive to waking up and starting the day.

The user may be too tired to look at the count directly, but he or she will still be aware of the pulses of light with each count. This may even prompt curiosity on what is being displayed on this particular day, which can help motivate the urge to look over and see, and from there feel more connected to the outside world, and - hopefully - a greater desire to get up and be a part of it. 

In the prototype, we only use a dummy data stream. More on this in the process section. 

If we had more time, we would have used an LED display where we could display both the count and what data is being represented.