"Sleep capsules" for the homeless arrive in Germany

In Germany there are about 860,000 homeless people and every year, with the arrival of cold weather, they risk freezing to death. Fortunately, death by hypothermia is not an everyday occurrence, but it does happen frequently.



The Ulmer Nest company, to face this emergency, is trying to do its part by designing structures, warm and cozy, dedicated to the homeless as a shelter.
These are real "sleep capsules" with futuristic operation: each of these can accommodate a maximum of two people, is solar powered and is made of wood and steel. The capsule closes from the inside, a motion sensor directly alerts social workers to provide cleaning when not in use.



On January 8, 2021, the first capsules (pods) were installed in the northern German city of Ulm as part of a pilot project that, if successful, will be replicated throughout the state.



As one Ulmer Nest team member told the Bored Panda website, "Initially, we created a sort of 'think tank/creative lab' project here in Ulm with the (perhaps somewhat bold) idea that everyone could submit their problem, whatever it might be, to give us a chance to solve it - basically we wanted to challenge ourselves, being an interdisciplinary team of six designers and technologists so far quite successful - We asked some experts to decide which of the submitted problems we should actually work on, for 48 hours each. And then, the city of Ulm basically presented their 'problem' which was this: 'We have homeless people who can't go to shelters and we don't want them to freeze to death, can you do something about that?' And our experts chose that as the task to work on".