Award Number :10C05026 Award-winning item : capsule hotel [9h (nine hours)] Company : Cubic Corporation Producer : Cubic Corporation Director : Fumie Shibata, President, Principal designer, design studio S Designer : Concept/ Produdt design: Fumie Shibata/ Sign & Graphic design: Masaaki Hiromura/ Interior design: Takaaki Nakamura

"Urban overnight lodging specializing in stays for business and other active purposes, based on the concept of one hour of showering, seven hours of sleep and one hour of getting dressed, adding up to nine hours. This focusing of the functions of lodging as just sleeping and showering is a radical approach. Customers sleep in the "Sleeping Pod," 9h's original fiber-reinforced plastic unit, while all places outside the unit are public space shared with all other customers. Units use the "Shinshitsu Kankyo (Bedroom Environment) System," in which customers fall asleep and wake up according to the light, with the aim of providing a good night's sleep for the sleeping time available. The functions and facilities are appropriate for a nine-hour stay, but customers can stay up to 17 hours for the same price."

The judges gave high marks to the designers for seriously considering what a capsule hotel is, the capsule units, the signage, and the amenities, and looking at new concepts for every aspect of this type of lodging. The newly built sleeping pods make use of the forms typical of FRP to create a soft, pleasant space, and the capsule's built-in environmental system provides continuous control of the light environment in accordance with human biorhythms to support the natural rhythm of sleeping and waking. The designers attempted to provide the best possible sleep in every aspect, including the pillows and the nightwear. They aim for a certain integrity that does not undercut the expectation that you may be able to sleep better than when staying in an ordinary hotel. In addition, in order to maintain the pricing typical of a capsule hotel, they kept the project on a small scale, but in order to make this compactness feel more comfortable, the color schemes in the rooms and the signage were both bold and detailed, and we liked the exceptional coherence of it all.

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