Conceptual design for a bed
There is no such thing as over-engineering !
There is such a thing as piling one solution upon another. this is not engineering; this is “patching” (such as in Lego vs woodwork or solutions vs creations).
Due to the nature of my work I have been made privy to the chain of events that lead up to industrial accidents - Never it is a single suboptimal choice that caused it but it takes a whole chain of sloppy decision making, combined with plan continuation bias.
I think I have by now justified the excessive amount of time I’ll be spending on the design of a bed in the coming weeks.
The experience leading up to this was sleeping in a bed where the owner had gone through considerable length to buy a double bed that would fit both a featherlight and a heavy-set person equally comfortable … and failed miserably at it. Core of the problem seemed lateral pressure differentiation. For a single person to lie comfortably there is no need whatsoever for a difference in force, or length of travel, between the right and left side of the bed. In fact, it is uncomfortable because it steers you in a certain direction and hampers in-sleep movement.
Using scientific words does not make it science, neither is a combination of truths necessarily a valid construct. ;-)
For two people to experience a different pressure profile in the same bed a lateral (right-to-left) difference is needed. This problem I am not aiming to solve. Whatever I come up with along the way may do so, but cannot help the two people in the bed. If they wanted to sleep in close proximity they should have picked a hardness that is acceptable for both.
What I am taking from this is a need for longitudinal differentiation but lateral equality in length of travel for optimal comfort and use this to take the concept of a bed back to the drawing board. ;-)