It’s hard to imagine greeting Monday with enthusiasm. It signals the end of the weekend and, usually, a return to work. New York design firm IDEO has added some joy to Mondays with a trio of products that are guaranteed to make you smile on that most dreaded of days.

Created for Studio 360’s Redesigns series, the products are referred to collectively as Monyay! Lolzzz, the alarm clock above, starts out your Monday with a hearty laugh. The cute, minimalist timepiece features a curved back and a “bellybutton” on the front.

It wakes you with the sounds of children laughing as it tips back and rolls with laughter, a sound that has been proven to improve the mood. Every Monday brings a new recording of laughter so it’s like a little gift to yourself each week. To increase the volume of the laughter, you tickle the clock’s little bellybutton. To snooze, just set it up on its end.

Getting back into a schedule after a carefree weekend is such a drag. Looking at all of those little boxes with the week’s appointments in them can be daunting, and there’s nothing fun about the standard calendar. PopUp is a colorful calendar app that uses bright, animated polka dots to display your appointments. The app gives you sweet little reminders of how to find joy no matter what you’re doing. You might be having lunch with a new acquaintance (a great chance to make a new friend) or let you know about a lovely piece of public art near your next meeting.

PopUp is accompanied by a whimsical desk accessory that replaces annoying reminder beeps with bubbles. When an appointment is coming up, PopUp blows and releases a bubble. Instead of irritating you with a grating sound, it delights you with a silly, fun visual reminder.

Sincerely is a practice in gratitude that reminds you of everything you’re thankful for. It evokes two sweetly innocent images: the wagging tail of a happy dog and the can-and-string telephones of childhood. The app reminds you to cap off every Sunday evening by recording a message of gratitude to someone you care about. You use the corded can to record a message and the recipient is notified when their can begins wagging its little tail. They can then hold the receiver up to an ear to listen to your words.

Regularly expressing gratitude can actually improve your health and help you live longer, so making a habit of thanking the important people in your life is good for more than strengthening relationships. This tactile method of sending and receiving messages is so much more personal than getting a text or an email. And by ending your Sunday on a note of thanks, you can wake up on Monday morning feeling warm and fuzzy.

The post Impossible Dream: Making Mondays Bearable (and Fun) first appeared on Gajitz.

If you’re like most of us, hearing the alarm clock trying to wake you up in the morning is the least motivating sound you’ll hear all day. The ALARMclock might change that for you by waking you up with words that are actually quite alarming.

The little wood-grain clock is unassuming and even quite attractive, but it really shines when it comes time to get you out of bed in the morning. The clock gives you a reason to be motivated enough to start your day. Users can choose to hear whatever will scare them awake most effectively: their expected lifespan, their current financial situation, or the size of their social networks.

Fig, the company behind the ALARMclock, designed the display with a retro 2-bit display. Even when you get bad news that shocks you onto your feet in the wee hours of the morning, the clock looks rather cute delivering that news. The project quickly surpassed its fundraising goal on Kickstarter, earning tons of supporters who really want to wake up to sobering facts about personal and social instability.

The post Clock Uses Genuine Alarm and Motivation to Get you Moving first appeared on Gajitz.

Most alarm clocks only do the bare minimum required of them: they tell the time and wake you up. The Clockee Talkee goes a few steps further and adds communication to its list of abilities. The Clockee Talkee from Milad Modir is half alarm clock, half intercom system.

In a home or business where communication between different parts of a building is necessary, shouting or running over to the other party aren’t always the best possible ways to spread a message. The Clockee Talkee acts like an intercom without complex wiring or the expense of a whole intercom system.

The little cube features an LED display, a speaker, microphone, and even a thermometer. A small button on top lets one user communicate with another up to .6 miles (1 kilometer) away. Voices are converted into radio waves and transmitted via open field communication.

To activate the thermometer, one only needs to clap. The clock will display the time and temperature in either celsius and fahrenheit. The Clockee Talkee can be used on the go with three AAA batteries, letting you take the simple modern design anywhere you please.

The post Telling Time: A Modern Alarm Clock With a Hidden Talent first appeared on Gajitz.

Maybe we’ve been spoiled by technology, but sometimes reaching for the iPhone and mashing the “snooze” button on the touchscreen is just too much early-morning thinking for us. Victor Johansson must have felt the same way when he created the Tangible Alarm.

The alarm looks like a piece of wood with three iPhone-sized slots separated by raised pieces of wood. Inside, there’s some near-field communication (NFC) technology going on that means all you have to do in the morning is pick up your phone and move it a few inches.

The middle slot turns the alarm on. In the morning when the alarm wakes you, you can move the phone to the right to snooze it or to the left to shut it off completely.

The simplified interaction is much less complex than having to interact with the touchscreen while half asleep. Those of us who are severely myopic and don’t want to put glasses on just to find the “snooze” button can relate to just how awesome this alarm is.

Besides being useful and easy to use, the Tangible Alarm looks quite lovely sitting on your bedside table. Much better than the traditional alarm clock with its too-bright numbers and ugly plastic case.

The post Simple Alarm Eliminates Early Morning Touchscreen Mashing first appeared on Gajitz.

People who hate getting up in the morning need a creative alarm that will not only wake them up, but get them to stay up. The Sleep If U Can app is a smartphone-based alarm that forces you to get out of bed and take a specific picture before it will turn off. You pre-set the picture yourself, preferably a picture of something that is far away from your bed but always in your home, like your front door or bathroom sink. Then when the alarm wakes you, you take another picture of the same thing. If the pictures match, you’re free to continue your day.

There is also a setting that requires you to shake the phone a certain number of times before it shuts off. Presumably this is based on the idea that once you start moving around, it’s much harder to drift back to sleep. For $2, the app seems like a pretty good deal – just don’t forget to shut off the picture-matching setting before you leave for vacation or you’ll have a rather unpleasant first morning of holiday ahead of you. The app is available both in the iTunes App Store and the Google Play store.

The post Evil Alarm App Makes You Take a Specific Pic to Turn it Off first appeared on Gajitz.