Good Night Lamp

Good Night Lamp is a connected object. When a big lamp is turned on, any little lamps connected to it also turn on - no matter where they are in the world. I’ve done a few pieces of consultancy work for the GNL team, focusing both on technological implementation and designing interactions.

In 2012, I did some discovery and design work with GNL around the possible online interactions around lamps. That involved some meetings and discussion, followed by a lot of thinking and drawing. I ended up delivering a set of wireframes and interaction designs for online configuration of lamps and possible physical interactions with them.

I wrote this work up at the time over on the GNL website.

In 2016, Alex got in touch with me about building what I would come to call ‘fleet management’ software: an administration tool for the GNL team to manage lamps. This would allow the GNL team to connect and manipulate lamps themselves from a simple web-based UI - tracking their wherabouts in the world, logging notes on them, all interfacing through their connectivity partner’s API.

Even though the fleet management tools were relatively straightforward, they represented a big quality-of-life improvement for the GNL team. Slowly, we’ve replaced some regimented and careful use of shared spreadsheets with a domain-specific tool, that’s more reliable and more directly integrated with lamps themselves.

It’s hopefully a platform the company can build upon in due course - and I’m continuing to work occasionally on adding features to it. It’s also been rewarding to see early language and ideas I worked on a few years back still shaping ideas within the product.