Last night I couldn’t sleep. So I lay there awake for at least an hour and I thought of some things. Mainly just irrelevant stuff, but often I get some new perspectives on things just by letting my brain go out and do the job it does (hopefully) best, (re)organizing memories. Suddenly my stream of consciousness reached ‘alarm clocks’.
I had the (crazy) idea that it would be quite cool to have a super simple alarm clock that is actually user friendly. I don’t know what fancy clocks you’ve got but the most alarm clocks I own are much too complicated to set up for just letting them wake you on a specific time. Of course I know, they are not that difficult to understand that nobody could use them, but as my aim is to create the most perfect minimalism there is much room for enhancement.
What I imagined: A block of perfectly white plastic, about 10x5x2.5cm. On one side there is an almost borderless display (monochrome, but pixel-based and with high contrast, maybe OLED or something like that), on top is a huge button for ‘snooze’ and on both sides it has ‘arms’ you can move up and down (fancy levers) which also have an LED at the end.
It will behave like this: to set your alarm you just push both ‘arms’ up (enter alarm mode) and than you can set the alarm time by using the left ‘arm’ for setting the hour and the right one for the minute. Wait some seconds or push the arms up again and the display will say, ‘alarm set’ (yes, it should really use lowercase letters).
What happens if you wake up before your alarm clock? Usually you have to deactivate the alarm at all so it won’t go off later. With my alarm clock you just had to push the ‘snooze’ button once and it will ask you ‘already awaken?’. You then can either confirm this with another hit on ‘snooze’ (‘good morning!’) or you can, of course, ignore it and the clock will do nothing.
