For our first assignment for class, we needed to “Imagine an ‘electronic’ ritual and prototype the necessary systems to perform the ritual. Then perform the ritual and document the process. ”

I decided to try my hand at my waking up ritual. Let me backtrack a bit. I am not a morning person. Waking up is nothing short of a struggle, every day, and no matter what I’ve tried (and I have tried a lot of things) nothing seems to work. Only when I have to catch a flight do I seem to manage to wake up when I need to.

So, for my ritual, I decided to try a new way of waking up. I’ve read a couple of articles that say you should try waking up to music, instead of the jarring alarm sound, so after doing some research, I downloaded the Nightstand Central app and decided to give it a shot for a week or so to see if it would work.

The first day, it didn’t work at all. The app is a bit glitchy and unless you leave it open on your phone, it doesn’t seem to go off. Once I figured that out and fixed the error, I set it for the rest of the days and it seemed to go off without a problem.

I have to say, it worked pretty nicely. Aside from the fact that I would let the song finish playing and then go back to sleep (oops), I would wake up without wanting to murder the world and be pretty awake after. I thin it also helps that I have song OCD and can’t stop a song while it’s playing, so I would usually wait until it was done, three or so minutes later.

I think I may adopt this in general! But I think I’m gonna start placing the phone across the room so that I have to wake up and turn it off.