Sentient furniture / Roamniture

Living fast lifestyle of today asks for development of our own surroundings which we use on a daily basis. Namely our own homes, office spaces, classrooms etc. We need building environment which can be self-sustained or rather to say "host sustained" and not passive container of space which doesn't keep up with the speed of our own life. In our home situation there are several cycles of activities that require changing the space in terms of furniture configuration. On a daily level these are the morning, afternoon, and evening cycles; during the week they are working day and weekend cycles; during the month they are social events like visits and parties, regular occurring events like cleaning, or contingent events like repairs and maintenance; during the year they can be linked to the seasonal change, and so on. Configuration changes in the domestic situation are usually kept to a minimum because of the associated effort to establish the changes before and to revert to the previous situation after the event. This leads to situations that are well balanced to one major configuration but sub-optimal or even bad for many other events. In this research we investigate what will happen when such change becomes much easier, by giving furniture intelligent and autonomous mobility. This will be possible by creating prototypes which will test this idea in a real time environment.