Sleep Planning with Awari: Uncovering the Materiality of Body Rhythms using Research through Design

With the increasing adoption of body tracking technology, users are able to collect bio-data which designers struggle to make legible or actionable. This work focused on increasing this technology-mediated bodily understanding through exploring the material properties of the body rhythms that govern the sleep behaviours being tracked. Building from a workshop with non-normative sleepers, we reframe sleep tracking to be about understanding and manipulating body rhythms. We explore these rhythms through the RtD process of designing the Awari alertness-forecast and scheduling application in four iterations. This resulted in three non-exclusive categories of rhythmic influence: Slow & Cyclical, Pressure & Release, and Anchored. Through a better understanding of how they interact, their inertia, and their material properties for interaction we encourage the design of technology to shape, and be shaped, by the complex rhythms of life. We discuss ways in which this can democratise medical-models, and make actionable complex bodily processes.