Sally Cloke

This is the text of a nine-minute Lightning Talk I gave as part of Research and Innovation week at Cardiff Metropolitan University in July 2024.

Prynhawn dda, pawb. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sally Cloke and I’m going to start my lightning talk with a question: How many designers does it take to change a lightbulb?

The answer, of course, is Does it have to be a lightbulb?’

All good jokes are based in truth, and lurking behind that tired old joke is something very insightful about the power of design.

Over the past few decades, there’s been a change in how industry views the job of the designer. Clients used to ask: Can you make this look good? Now they ask: Can you help solve this problem?

That’s a big step forward. But there’s still a way to go. Because the most significant contribution that designers can make, in the commercial world and in research, is not in solving problems, but in framing them.

The most useful tool in the designer’s arsenal is this…

Holds up medium-sized picture frame.

The problem frame. That’s because problems don’t come ready made. They need defining and refining. Problem framing describes the process of clarifying questions, testing assumptions and setting boundaries to get to “the problem behind the problem”.

Einstein is quoted as saying: “if I had one hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solution”.

So, with what’s left of my nine minutes, I’m going apply to this concept of problem framing to my research into the relationship between design, sleep and social justice.

It seems everywhere we look, there’s a new product or lifehack designed to improve our sleep. These range from smartphone apps or other wearables that track body movement and temperature, to cuddly toys with a heartbeat designed to calm our nervous systems, to grounded bed sheets that discharge our excess static electricity, so we don’t spontaneously combust in the night. All up, the market for sleep products is worth into the tens of billions.

Now, this focus on sleep makes sense. There’s growing evidence that not getting enough sleep contributes to a range of mental and physical health conditions with serious consequences for individuals and society. From dementia, to heart disease, to depression, and increased workplace accidents.

You may not be surprised that many of these new sleep products have no scientifically supported benefits. Even a simple sleep tracker app can do more harm than good. Not only are they often inconsistent or unreliable, quantification itself has given rise to a new health condition: ‘orthosomnia’. Apparently, some people become so obsessed with getting ideal sleep they stay awake worrying about it.

But there’s a bigger issue here. And it applies to more traditional sleep products – like earplugs and sleeping pills – as well as newer ones. It’s this:

Holds up small picture frame.

Their problem framing is too small: they frame sleep at an individual level.

Now sometimes poor sleep is due to an individual’s poor choices – study left to the last minute or binge-watching boxsets. But just as with every other aspect of human health, individual and behavioural factors play a much smaller role than demographic, economic and structural ones. Sleep is socially determined. And very few of these determinants are within the power of an individual to change or control, with or without the latest sleep product.

A soothing bedtime podcast may help the anxious thoughts that are keeping you awake, but it has no effect on your precarious employment as a food delivery rider, the actual source of your worries. A gentle sunrise alarm clock may make it more pleasant to to get up at 6am, but it cannot compensate for being kept awake past 2am being elbowed in the head because you have to share a bed with your little brother.

Then there’s urban noise, light pollution, addictive technology, long commutes, family caring commitments, lack of access to healthcare or nutritious food, no safe place for exercise or play, the demands of the 24/7 economy, poor health knowledge, disability, race discrimination… The things that make waking life hard make sleep harder, too.

Sleep exists in an ecosystem of institutions, practices and norms, shaped by inequalities of money and privilege, with a host of players including big pharma, tech companies, government agencies, health bodies, and the media. While some people go without sleep – others profit. Like any area where access to common goods are unfairly distributed, sleep is a social justice issue.

If we’re going to really make a difference to how people sleep – and the wellbeing of our communities – we’re going to need a bigger frame.

Holds up large picture frame.

My research explores how design could shape a more sleep-positive world by framing the problem of sleep on a societal scale. Going beyond gadgets to co-ordinated approaches that put good sleep at the heart of the good society. Recognising that housing providers, employers, community groups, researchers, policy-makers and people with lived experience of sleep injustice all have roles to play.

We’ve seen that commercial product design is not doing a good job at framing sleep. So I’ve been exploring the alternative field of speculative design. Speculative design is like the science fiction of design. As a research practice rather than a commercial one, its free to be experimental, playful and provocative – to spend all of its time on the problem, presenting audiences with new ways of looking at familiar things. It takes the ultimate object of capitalist desire – the consumer good – and defamiliarises it to create, if not exactly a consumer bad, then certainly a consumer weird.

I’ve found a many more examples of speculative designs that recognise the socially determined nature of sleep than I have commercial ones. Like an alarm clock that doesn’t wake you up at a certain time, but only after you’ve sleep a certain amount. And one I’ve been working on – a futuristic app that lets you go without sleep as much as you want, but that calculates how much shorter your life’s going to be.

And I’ve been running workshops introducing the idea of the sleep-positive society and getting people to make maps of sleeptopia, where there’s room for play, protest and music – as well as sleep.

In this election campaign, we haven’t heard much about sleep, but politicians have been busy framing a lot of other problems for us, so we know where the blame lies. Immigrants. People on welfare. What the other side of politics has or hasn’t done. Maybe with a bigger frame, there’d be room to include a few nuances to that picture, some social and economic factors, maybe a little empathy. Who knows, we might even see ourselves as part of the problem.

Diolch for listening.

I visited the English seaside resort of Brighton in early June to present some of my work at a conference on the interface between sound and social justice.

Sonic Rebellions is a two-day symposium of panel discussions, interactive workshops and film screenings that explores how artists, academics and activists use music and sound to engage with social and political issues in new ways. The biennial event is co-hosted by the University of Brighton and the London School of Economics.

I delivered a workshop entitled Sound (a)sleep: Design speculations and the sleep-positive city.

The workshop explored the application of my research into sleep, design and social equity to the concept of spatial justice. Spatial justice is a relatively new way of thinking about the design of urban spaces. It recognises that access to resources and services like public transport, healthy food options or safe streets are often unfairly distributed in our cities, and that this helps intrench injustices such as racism, sexism and isolation.

My workshop asked participants to think about the aspects of modern cities that support or hinder good sleep and how they’re distributed. Attendees then discussed the idea of sleep and justice and were invited to creatively respond to the discussion through drawing, collage or map-making.

It was challenging making the case for the liberating power of silence in a context where sound and noise was overwhelmingly seen as positive and empowering. How do we make space for the silence we need without silencing creative, marginal and heterodox voices?

Below are some of the creative responses generated. I was prompted to explore the concept of ‘wall creep’ – my term to describe what happens when a wall or other barrier is erected for an ‘innocent’ reason, such as dampening the sound from a busy road, but becomes a real/symbolic instrument of repression, such as delineating the ‘bad’ side of town.

A big thank you to everyone who took part and the organisers of Sonic Rebellions.

I made a two minute video (actually 1 minute 49 seconds) as a very brief introduction to my sleep justice design research. It was quite fun to make, especially filming in City Road at night. There were less people around than we thought but luckily a bus came past. Huge thanks to Bryce for shooting and helping with finessing sound and colour grading and to Ruth for helping out on the City Road shoot.

Here’s something I wrote for our work blog:

PDR’s Dr Sally Cloke was interviewed on BBC Radio’s Free Thinking about her research into sleep, design and justice.

Sally was part of a panel with other academics discussing various aspects of sleep, including sleep in fiction, politics and sleep and the history of the alarm clock.

“I talked about the boom in new sleep devices such as sleep trackers, sleep headphones and ‘smart’ bedding,” said Sally, PDR’s Human Centred Design Assistant Researcher. “While these products are targeted at the individual’s sleep experience, in reality the factors that affect how well we sleep are environmental and economic – urban noise, inadequate housing, precarious employment, the 24/7 economy. These need addressing on a social and political level, not with new and better gadgets.”

“I was also able to share my passion for speculative and critical design and discuss its potential role in raising people’s awareness of how good sleep has become a consumer good. It’s not so much that we’re losing sleep: capitalism is stealing it – then selling it back to us.”

The program aired on Radio 3 on March 13 and is now available on the BBC website (click here for details and to listen) and as an episode of the Free Thinking / Arts & Ideas podcast.

On Tuesday I paid a visit to Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives to see their pop-up exhibition on sleep and dreams. This display presented a carefully curated selection of old and rare books and other printed material from the archives presenting a literary history of sleep and dreams. They also had a gorgeous set of promotional bookmarks and postcards, which I helped myself to.

It was fascinating to see how so many of our contemporary anxieties around sleep have counterparts in the mediaeval period. How much sleep is enough? How do we ensure we sleep well? How can we avoid bad dreams? These seem to be perennial questions. While most modern people aren’t concerned about witches’ curses causing our insomnia, many of us would attest to the almost supernatural power of the smartphone and tablet to bewitch us and steal away our slumber.

The exhibition also pointed me in some new directions which may not fit into my current research into the sociological aspects of poor sleep but could well spark some further investigations in a related area – the link between sleep, dreams and political desire. There’s the trope of the sleeper who wakes from a magically prolonged slumber into a new, utopian society. And the legends of past heroes who are not dead, but sleeping, and will return to save their people when the need is sufficiently dire (this category apparently includes Owain Glyndwr, the last true Prince of Wales). These politically-charged stories combine the visionary aspects of dreams as well as the mysterious, not-quite-alive nature of being asleep (two states that are available to all regardless of social station), to create positive revolutionary propaganda.

A big “diolch” is due to Sara Huws, Civic Engagement Officer, Libraries and Archives at Cardiff University, for taking time to show me the collection and for an inspiring chat about her research and interests.

Some images from the exhibition

Part of a semi-regular series of brief descriptions and links to articles on sleep (and sleep justice) in the news.

Assistive technologies for sleep have been around a lot longer than we might think. While smart-phone apps are relatively new, the first “sleep conditioner” appliance – basically a bedside white-noise generator – was invented in around 1960 as a response to a night in a noisy hotel room. Read The Atlantic‘s article on origins and development of the Rubber Maid Sleep-Mate – today updated and rebranded as the Dohm and apparently still popular.

Covid hasn’t gone away (as much as we might like to pretend). And research has linked it to even more unpleasant effects – this time insomnia and other sleep difficulties. It’s even more pronounced with the dreaded long Covid. The Conversation has the bad news here. While the article promises to offer advice on how to sleep better despite Covid, the recommendations follow the same old list of personal/individual interventions. Sigh…

Finally, if you want something a little more scholarly but still understandable – and that actually places sleep in its social context! – The Journalist’s Resource has an excellent “explainer”. Covering recent research into sleep disparities, it includes links to articles on how inequality can impact sleep, and the important role played by factors like race, education level, gender and socio-economic status.

Apparently, while more men experience sleep-apnea, which is commonly causes by physical health factors such as obesity, more women suffer from plain old trouble sleeping. According to one researcher:

“…there’s a psychological component to higher rates of insomnia in women, as they’re more likely to be affected by domestic violence, workplace discrimination, misogyny in workplace and in the world.”

Sleep justice is a feminist issue! Pass it on.

I know I’m skipping ahead a bit, and I haven’t been posting about my actual concept development, but I want to cut to the chase and discuss the user-testing workshop I ran yesterday with 10 of my PDR colleagues.

I’ve been working on a number of possible ways to use speculative design to raise public awareness of the social and economic factors that affect whether people get enough sleep. I’d chosen three concepts and developed them to paper prototype – ie realistic visualisation – level. I’ll talk more about these in a future post. Here I want to focus on the workshop.

The workshop had two aims. The first was to gather ideas from people to find out what they believed played a role in whether they got enough sleep. The second was to see if speculative design “worked” by getting people thinking in creative ways about what they needed to get enough sleep.

I divided participants into two groups of five. Group A was tasked with brainstorming everything they felt had an impact on them getting enough sleep, whether positive or negative, and write their responses on sticky-notes. Their next job was to transfer the sticky-notes to a large version of the following diagram, to see what patterns emerged. The diagram features five concentric circles which represent different levels at which our environment (in the broadest sense of the word) impacts on our sleep: individual, sociodemographic, interpersonal, community and policy, and society.

I gave Group B a quick overview of my speculative design concepts for sleep justice. Then they played a simplified version of Situation Lab’s futures thinking activity, The Thing from the Future. They were given two sets of cards, one labelled Futures, which specified a particular kind of future (Green, Feminist, etc) and the other labelled Things (Building, Clothing Item, etc). They chose one card from each set to create a prompt for developing a sleep-related speculative design intervention. They prototyped their concepts using card and paper.

It was a lot to fit into an hour, but it worked, thanks to some very willing participants. Here are a couple of photos from the workshop.

The next step is to take the data (what was said, written and created in the workshop) and analyse it. One interesting output I can report on: looking at the sticky-note diagram, one participant commented: “There’s nothing in society [ie at societal level] that’s good for sleep, only bad for it.”

Over the past months while I’ve been working on my sleep justice and design research project I’ve made some great connections with other academics doing interesting work in and adjacent to the field.

Prof Jonathan White. Jonathan is a political philosopher at London School of Economics. Reading his article in Aeon and its more scholarly version in the Journal of Political Philosophy sparked my original interest in sleep justice. Jonathan’s main research areas are in European politics and sleep is something of a side project for him.

Prof Lauren Hale. Lauren is a pioneer researcher in the sociological determinants of sleep. Based at Stony Brook University in NY she has written extensively on the connections between sleep and factors such as disadvantage, urban environment and life-stage.

Dr Sebastian Klinger. Sebastian is a literature fellow at Oxford University and the convenor of the Sleep and the Rhythms of Life research network. They’re investigating how sleep is represented in literature and the arts, a truly fascinating topic.

It’s very interesting to see how the field of sleep studies is becoming broader to include much more than medical and scientific approaches. And it’s a real privilege to be able to discuss ideas with such a range of smart and thoughtful people. It’s clear that recognition is growing that sleep is not just an individual, biological phenomenon, but social, culture, political and economic. As such, it “presents a vital opportunity for intervention from the humanities” (Heubener 2018, p. 67). And from design.

Part of a semi-regular series of brief descriptions and links to articles on sleep (and sleep justice) in the news.

I had a look at my proposed research plan to find out just how behind I am. I’ve done some 3D printing and put in a long book order. And quite a bit of reading, thinking, note-taking and scribbling has been done. There will be a time to stop looking and start doing in earnest. But it seems there’s always something new to read about sleep.

This New Yorker article isn’t exactly new, but it is fascinating. It describes some pro-sleep interventions that sound speculative but aren’t, like smart pillows, headsets, and other gadgets (see below), as well as podcasts and meditation courses. But the main point comes in the title: Sleep is the New Status Symbol. “I can see sleep being another weapon in competitive parenting and career-building,” says one researcher. Should we put our average hours of sleep on our resumes? Now there’s an idea.

Being bored is supposed to send us to sleep. So The Guardian lists the best podcasts designed to bore us silly. “Designed to” is the key term here. They actually sound a bit too interesting, actually. What about listening to something just plain old boring?

Next, a writer for The Vulture goes on an odyssey through the latest in sleep wisdom in search of a better night’s sleep. Every night for two weeks she tries a different technique. Playing late night video games does not help – perhaps not unsurprisingly. In fact, nothing she tries really works. The article includes some interesting comments on the snobbery lurking behind judgements on people’s late night habits. Is staying up late watching junk TV so frowned on because it’s terrible for your sleep or because it’s junk TV and therefore bad?

Part of a semi-regular series of brief descriptions and links to articles on sleep (and sleep justice) in the news.

I won’t apologise for the long hiatus in posting. Life gets in the way of both sleep and work. In this case, some good things in life like travel and moving house. But sleep news waits for no-one, so here are a few articles I’ve bookmarked over recent weeks.

On the topic of travel, apparently sleep tourism is a thing. CNN reports on a growing trend in the hotel industry to promote their rooms as destinations for getting an optimum night’s rest. Premium beds, toiletries, pampering experiences – even sessions with sleep coaches – are on offer to tempt the weary traveller.

Somethings I look forward to when staying in a nice hotel are a large comfy bed and blackout curtains. But intentionally visiting a retreat or guesthouse in order to get a good sleep may set up unrealistic expectations. And according to The Guardian, trying too hard to get to sleep is the worst thing you can do. Falling asleep is a passive process and worrying about it will only keep us awake. Which is hardly news to insomnia sufferers, who are well used to the vicious circle of worry – poor sleep – worry about poor sleep – worse sleep – more worry…

While we love to pretend that Covid is over, apparently the pandemic – and the disruption that shut-downs and stay-at-home orders caused to our daily schedules – is still affecting our sleep and contributing to insomnia. This Time article follows the well-worn route of blaming us for our slack schedules and poor sleep habits, without considering that maybe worrying about getting sick, losing our jobs, home-schooling our kids and safeguarding our elderly parents while the Government showed itself spectacularly ill-prepared to manage a health crisis just might have had something to do with it.

Finally, Vox tempts us with the subversive suggestion that we can still take an afternoon nap and muck about on our phones in bed and not ruin our sleep. I didn’t find anything particularly new here – the answer is moderation, apparently. But the article is noteworthy for the fact that it actually acknowledges that societal not just personal factors affect sleep, and many of them are outside our control. A couple of quotes:

Sleep deprivation is, ultimately, a systemic issue, and people shouldn’t feel broken for the societal issues impacting sleep.

…if [some] solutions are not feasible for you because of space, finances, or work, it is not your fault. Our built environment’s negative impact on sleep is not on you to fix.

The societal factors they list include the neighbours’ bright lights, shift work, caring for children and snoring partners. While this is hardly exhaustive, let’s hope this starts a trend of popular articles on sleep that acknowledge it’s not all about (poor) personal choices. A poorly designed society has a big role to play.