New Design Museum installation Circadian Dreams lets visitors have a 12-minute nap

Exhausted Londoners are being encouraged to ditch their smartphones for a nap inside an installation examining the “time crisis” causing modern life to disappear so quickly.

The Circadian Dreams show at the Design Museum “investigates how technology has fragmented our sense of time” to get people to improve their sleep by listening to their body’s natural rhythms, such as heartbeat.

Visitors are told to lie back on a bed for a 12-minute nap with mood lighting designed to simulate natural conditions, from a red sunrise to “activating” blue.

Creator Helga Schmid said she wanted to explore the idea that Londoners have “no time”, and how technology has left us “imprisoned in a system of clocks and calendars”.

Schmid is designer in residence at the Design Museum and researches concepts of time and its relation to biology and sociology through design.