The Barisieur

The worst part of Mondays isn’t Monday itself—it’s the moment your alarm pulls you out of sleep. Nothing prepares you for it. The sound is designed to be awful, a jolt, a punishment. You open your eyes to darkness and the immediate weight of the day ahead.

I read about this device called the Barisieur, designed by Joshua Renouf at Nottingham Trent University. It’s an alarm clock that brews coffee while it wakes you up. Instead of that grinding beep, you surface slowly into the smell of hot coffee. The sound is still there, but there’s something else pulling you forward. By the time you’re awake enough to think clearly, there’s a cup waiting.

It solves nothing, really. You’re still waking up. Monday is still there. But the sensory path feels gentler—smell before sound, warmth before the cold shock of the day. It’s the kind of small intervention that designers keep circling back to: how do you make the inevitable less hostile?

I don’t know if the Barisieur actually made it into production. It was a graduation project, which means it might exist as a prototype, or it might just be a photograph and an idea. There’s something fitting about that ambiguity. The promise of a better morning living in that space between possible and real, forever out of reach.