Good Night Lamp
Alexandra Deschamps -Sonsino (UK)
Commercial Product, 2005
What effect does time zone or distance have on our relationships? How do you stay connected with your friends across the globe? Does the internet bridge that gap or detach us from our diaspora?
Good Night Lamp is one of the many products that live in the category of Internet of Things; a network of physical objects or ‘things’ embedded with software, sensors and connectivity that help them to achieve greater value and service. A ‘thing’ can be anything from a fridge to a football.
A physical social network designed for your global friends and family, Good Night Lamp is a family of internetconnected lamps that lets you share your presence and availability with your loved ones easily and in an ambient way. The product comes as a set of two lamps: a Big Lamp and a Little Lamp. When someone turns on the Big Lamp, the Little Lamp turns on too, enabling wordless communication between homes.
It allows the owner to keep in touch with people all over the world. The lamps harness the power of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) technologies to make this a simple to set up way of saying “Now’s a good time to call,” or “I’m okay.”
About the artist:
What effect does time zone or distance have on our relationships? How do you stay connected with your friends across the globe? Does the internet bridge that gap or detach us from our diaspora? Good Night Lamp is one of the many products that live in the category of Internet of Things; a network of physical objects or ‘things’ embedded with software, sensors and connectivity that help them to achieve greater value and service. A ‘thing’ can be anything from a fridge to a football. A physical social network designed for your global friends and family, Good Night Lamp is a family of internetconnected lamps that lets you share your presence and availability with your loved ones easily and in an ambient way. The product comes as a set of two lamps: a Big Lamp and a Little Lamp. When someone turns on the Big Lamp, the Little Lamp turns on too, enabling wordless communication between homes. It allows the owner to keep in touch with people all over the world. The lamps harness the power of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) technologies to make this a simple to set up way of sayinAlexandra Deschamps -Sonsino is an interaction designer, product designer, entrepreneur and international speaker. She was named 2nd in the Top 100 Internet of Things Thought Leaders (Onalytica, 2014) and is in Business Insider’s 2014 Top 100 Influential Tech Women on Twitter. She has built consumer-facing Internet of Things products, services and communities for clients such as BBC R&D, Nokia, British Gas, EDF and British Telecom. She is the founder of Good Night Lamp, co-founder of IOTAngels and co-editor of Connected, a quarterly publication on the Internet of Things. She runs the London Internet of Things Meetup for Xively — the largest meetup in the world dedicated to this topic. She was cofounder and CEO of Tinker London and a partner at RIG London. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and galleries around the world. Alexandra has a B.A.Sc. in industrial design from the Université de Montréal and an M.A. in Interaction Design from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy. “Now’s a good time to call,” or “I’m okay.”