As any New Yorker will tell you: space is a precious commodity in large dense cities. Autonomous vehicle advocates hope that one day self-driving fleets will eliminate the significant time traditional cars would have sat idle in garages or on city streets. It's time we started thinking about how often our apartments and houses sit idle as well. Considering the high cost of real estate in most large cities, learning to use urban space more efficiently could offer significant financial and environmental benefits.
One approach might be to effectively turn our larger living spaces into hourly time shares (perhaps the subject of another article). An alternative approach would be to significantly reduce the size of our dwelling units with the aim of cutting housing costs and containing urban sprawl. The concept below harnesses old fashioned space planning and 21st Century technology to collapse a three room apartment into a 400 square-foot studio!
Looks like a typical studio apartment. Looks can be deceiving...
By default, the unit above is configured as a typical studio apartment would be. What you can't see in this rendering are the tiny 4G-enabled devices embedded into each item of furniture in the pre-arranged layout. A simple voice command will order these devices to activate simple machines (wheels, pulleys, hinges, etc.) built into the "smart" furniture:
"set home for dinner party for six"
The layout manager app optimizes the routes that the bed and desk will need to take based on the positions of the dinner table and six chairs stored inside the "hangar" (a big closet with an exceptionally wide accordion door). A few moments later, the furniture pieces start to shuffle themselves into their preset positions.
The dimensions of the "hangar" will determine the number of possible preset layouts. This particular "hangar" is just large enough to accommodate the third preset furniture arrangement: a living room.
