Suzy Snooze is the latest in the BleepBleeps line of cute, connected devices that make parenting easier. BleepBleeps worked collaboratively with Map, briefing the team to design a connected, colorful and distinctive new baby monitor that incorporates additional functions such as a sleep trainer and night light.
Suzy Snooze is an innovative development of archetypal baby monitor designs, using reductive and playful industrial design and simpler forms of interaction. Controlled using the BleepBleeps app, Suzy Snooze allows parents to monitor their child's sleep via a smartphone and makes it easy to schedule and log sleep routines for children, even recommending unique sleep schedules for children based on their age.
Suzy Snooze also has a sleep sequence function, which uses sleep inducing patterns of light and sound, helping to create a consistent and calm environment for healthy sleep and allowing both children and the whole family get a better night's rest.
Map and BleepBleeps observed that most IoT products rely entirely upon smartphones for control. This means that some of the intuitiveness of hardware products can be lost. Suzy Snooze has just enough physical interaction to control its key features, and uses the benefits of a smartphone app to control additional complex features.
Working with BleepBleeps, Map designed Suzy Snooze with a simple physical interface and a single activation button integrated into Suzy Snooze's hat. When pushed down, the hat covers Suzy Snooze's eyes showing that it is asleep activating both the baby monitor and sleep trainer.
The brightness of the light can be adjusted by turning Suzy Snooze's hat. Volume override buttons were deliberately placed on the base so that children cannot adjust the settings themselves. In the morning, the hat lifts up and the night light turns off letting children know it is time to wake up.
One of the biggest design challenges was giving Suzy Snooze facial characteristics without making her too human or cartoonish. Map's design process led the team through various iterations before settling upon a simple stylistic cylindrical form. A character-like appearance is generated through both the large top hat and the facial details cut out from a felt band. Felt was selected to soften the look and feel of the design and is not just decorative; the cut-out for the mouth also functions as the hole for the microphone. The felt band also hides the speaker holes without preventing sound loss.
Traditional bedside lights utilise translucent plastic or frosted glass to diffuse light as opaque materials are notoriously difficult to emit light through. Map needed to overcome this challenge to prevent seeing the internal components when Suzy Snooze is switched off. Map carried out numerous lighting experiments and material studies before deciding upon 1mm ABS plastic for the Suzy Snooze hat. The ABS provided an opaque material which was thin enough to allow the light to emit through. Low energy LED's were used and stay cool to touch with optimised colour output that promotes natural sleep hormones. When the sleep cycle has finished a comforting night light keeps the child reassured throughout the night.
Map prototyped and tested every aspect of the design, as well as creating lighting test rigs and speaker tests. Map also created working rigs of the push button and encoder mechanism. In order to speed up the design process, Map started the design for manufacture process early, working on the initial engineering of the plastic components.