An uncanny night in a nature bubble: designing embodied sleeping experiences

This article is an uncanny journey to the Bubble. It provides an autoethnographic exploration of a novel form of tourism—glamping—and takes the reader into an adventure to a see-through plastic Bubble located in a nature park in France. Moreover, it unfolds a specific form of glamping, namely sleep-centric glamping, as part of a wider sleep tourism market in which experiences are sought for by way of sleeping in extraordinary places or spaces. By taking the sleeping body as its focus, the article explores how sleeping in an extraordinary place is bodily experienced. Furthermore, it sheds light to the ways the design of this particular tourist experience is a complex array, including both humans and nature, and which inevitably enables and constrains the connection between the human body and the nature’s body. The multidisciplinary approach inherent in the article allows the authors to unfold a meaningful but indeed challenging research topic: sleep.