David Lanphear

Prototype Showcase: Nap Room

If you haven’t participated in a Design Kit course yet – I highly encourage you to do so. Whether you are super experienced or brand new to the game, it’s always fun to try new things in a low pressure, highly creative context. Design Kit provides you that environment in which to be creative and to improve your skills.

A few colleagues and I enrolled in the prototyping course, and had some fun imagining work time improvements. Below is our end result:

The food coma. The big plans. The long night. There are plenty of reasons people long for a mid-day nap. And science is starting to back it up.

A quick Google search on the effects of napping will give you plenty of reasons to snooze. In fact, multiple studies have shown that napping for even just 15 – 20 minutes during the day is more effective (and better for you) than either 200mg of caffeine or a quick bit of exercise.

With that in mind, my team decided to have some fun and prototype what such a solution could look like in a more conservative work environment.

Originally given the challenge of “How might we improve employees’ health at work?” our ideas ranged from therapy dogs to fruit infused water. We synthesized, paper prototyped some apps, did some quick and dirty research to back up our ideas, and then finally settled on building our next prototype – the nap room.

Just about an hour later, we had our prototype up and running, ready to showcase to the world for inspirational feedback.

So what do you think? Without spending any money -and very little time- do you begin to understand what we are going for? Let’s build on this idea in the comments and let us know what works and what doesn’t work about this prototype.

PS – sorry for the awkward vertical video.

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