Imagine how much more productive we’d all be if we didn’t keep hitting the snooze button in the morning. A serial offender, the winner of 2005’s Ig Nobel Economics Prize, Gauri Nanda, was regularly late for classes at the MIT Media Lab until she invented the perfect solution.
Meet Clocky, an alarm clock on wheels with a mischievous side. Press his snooze button once and you’ll have a few minutes more to come to. Press it twice and Clocky will use those oversize wheels on shock absorbers to run away and hide. A microprocessor ensures he follows a different escape route every time, forcing you to get up and out of bed to find him, and turn off his alarm. One morning he might be hiding under your bed; another, lurking in the corner of your room or brazenly parked in the middle of your floor, just out of reach.
Originally developed for a class project, the robotic alarm caught the imagination of bloggers who brought Clocky to the wider public’s attention. By 2012, more than 500,000 units had been sold, making Gauri’s invention a runaway success.
Time marches (or in this case motors) on of course. Gauri’s family of gadgets now includes Tocky – the “tech-savvy cousin” of Clocky – and Pop Clocky.
