Bedbox mission statement:

To be happy, I need a cool and quiet place to sleep. That is a hard thing to find in most of the populated world, including NYC.

You do not need to make a whole building cool and quiet in order to have a cool and quiet place to sleep. You just need enough space for a bed. In a box.

For first world people like us, a bedbox would be a beautifully designed object that is part appliance and part architecture. You would order one for a few thousand dollars, pick out the options you want, and it would come flat packed Ikea-style via UPS. It would transform any 25sf of indoor floor space into a place where you could reliably get a good night sleep. It would be a refuge of comfort that you would look forward to climbing  into each night. I think it would completely change the way people think about “home” and have a profound impact on how people consume housing. It would be life changing for people who have never had a truly good night’s sleep and don’t even know it.

For the third world, a bedbox would likely be more like a tent than a box. Each would come with a tiny and silent AC unit that would be able to keep the sleeping space below 80F 70%RH even in the most miserable heat. The goal would be to make it cheap enough to be accessible to the next 2 billion people who all deserve a good night’s sleep no matter where they live. Nice side effect is that we preempt the other alternative: These same people have to wait longer to get access to AC and then they do it the western way, which would suck for the earth.

Some of the challenges to making a good bedbox include:

* Deigning a cheap and silent and reliable AC system sized for a bedbox.  I have done a lot of work here, but still much more to be done. There are also alternatives using off-the-shelf stuff, but it would be great to come up with something perfect here.
* Designing a light and flat packable structure that gives the sound attenuation we want. This is hard. I’ve done a LOT of work on this and had a lot of failures, and also looked at how others have failed. I have lots more ideas and think ultimately it is solvable, but will take much more work.
* Designing a welcoming and beautiful object- inside and out. Over the years I have built a few bedboxes for myself. They have all been ugly and unpleasant to be in. A bedbox can not feel like a coffin, and mine do. This is just as important as the technical challenges, and where I need the most help.