"I Want to Keep My Phone Away From the Bed": Designing a Smart Pillow for Sleep Onset

Pre-sleep digital consumption is widespread. While it is a common concern for bedtime procrastination, recent research also highlights its importance in fulfilling various pre-sleep needs, such as claiming "me time". However, these benefits and underlying needs have largely been overlooked in the design of digital sleep interventions. In this paper, we present a co-design workshop with 16 participants, exploring a smart pillow that allows audio-based digital consumption through non-distracting interactions. We illustrate the smart pillow’s potential in resolving the tension between digital consumption and sleep transition to support sleep onset — the transition from wakefulness to sleep. Our work highlights how the pillow’s physical form affords audio consumption control with minimal effort, and positions sleep onset as a distinct design context that demands careful attention when designing for sleep. We offer design implications that leverage tangible and bodily interactions to accommodate the sensitive transitioning state during sleep onset.