Although intended to foster spontaneous interactions among workers, a typical open-plan office layout cannot mitigate visual, acoustic, or privacy-related distractions that originate from unplanned meetings. As office workers often refrain from tackling these issues by manually demarcating or physically relocating to a more suitable subspace that is enclosed by movable partitions, we hypothesise that these subspaces could instead be robotically manifested. This study therefore evaluated the perceived impact of two mobile robotic partitions that were wizarded to jointly manifest an enclosed subspace, to: 1) either `mitigate' or `intervene' in the distractions caused by spontaneous face-to-face or remote meetings; or 2) either `gesturally' or `spatially' nudge a distraction-causing worker to relocate. Our findings suggest how robotic furniture should interact with office workers with and through transient space, and autonomously balance the distractions not only for each individual worker but also for multiple workers sharing the same workspace.

A universally acknowledged truth about living in New York City is that there's very little space to go around. What passes for an entire apartment in Manhattan is considered a walk-in closet in Des Moines. This dearth of square footage has resulted in a couple notable phenomenons: Namely, pocket-emptying rents and some--let's just call it--creative uses of space. Twenty floors up in a luxury midtown Manhattan studio apartment, a hulking piece of furniture sat pressed against the wall. From the front it looked like an entertainment console with built in shelving.

A furniture company has created a robotic furniture unit that can switch between bedroom, office and lounge settings. It was designed for life in highly populated cities around the world, where living spaces are becoming smaller and increasingly expensive. The system is available for pre-order by property developers and is set to be installed in properties across US cities within the next year. The company behind the furniture, Ori Systems, gets it's name from origami - the Japanese art of folding paper to create shapes. It was founded in a collaboration between MIT Media lab students and designers Yves Behar.

A few years ago, MIT designed a piece of furniture worth $10,000 -- not because it's made of luxury materials, but because it can transform at the press of a button. Now, that piece of robotic furniture called "Ori Systems" is available for pre-order, but only to large-scale development companies. Originally called CityHome, Ori is a single unit that looks like a large wooden cabinet meant for small homes, condos and apartments. It was originally designed to respond to hand gestures until the team tested their prototypes out by renting them to Airbnb. The current Ori has a control interface with buttons you can push to eject the bed, to slide the bed inside the unit and to move the cabinet to make more space for the desk on the other side.

I really need him back on the blog. We first wrote about Roombots three years ago, and back then the researchers at the EPFL Biorobotics Lab, led by Professor Auke Ijspeert, were just getting started with their self-assembling robotic furniture. Now the researchers have some real robots to show off. As Ijspeert himself puts it, this is a "crazy project" to create adaptive furniture that can change shape and functionality and even move around. His group has built robotic modules that can attach to one another and use onboard motors to change their shape.

Someday your home may need a drone landing pad. Whether its delivering packages or providing transport, drones are expected to play part of our lives in the coming years. Now, a new concept for a'Drone Tower' shows how we could shape our buildings to accommodate the rise in UAVs. As drones become more popular, eventually they will be incorporated into our homes, and blocks of flats will need to accommodate ways for the aircraft to land. A new concept for a'Drone Tower' shows how we could shape our buildings Charles Bombarier, a mechanical engineer in Quebec, Canada is founder of the blog Imaginactive, where he showcases far-fetched future design concepts.

Ori is introducing a line of architectural robotics, as they're described, which are meant to transform the way we arrange and decorate our bedrooms. Using these special pieces of furniture, you could theoretically take a studio apartment and transform it into a much larger space with plenty more functionality. The line of connected products is set to offer innovation for those in urban areas, where simply pressing a button can change a living room into a bedroom, walk-in closet or even an office connected via "smart-home ecosystem." In fact, the Ori line gets its name from "origami," which makes sense when you consider The first residential versions of the furniture will be rolled out by developers in Boston, Washington DC and Seattle this summer and the program will be accepting pilot program partners in early 2017.