iBelong
Future Workspace with Robots
This project imagines the future workspace with smart devices. The project includes design of architecture and imagines a future urban system. It's a response to today's free work style and the missing sense of belongings as we no longer have a fixed desk location.
iBelong incorporates a robotic ceiling system that can operate based on the small-size cargo robots, such as Kiva robot that Amazon is using.
The project is featured on the Harvard Graduate School of Design website in the students' work-in-progress page.
Key software and techniques:
Rhino, Unity, Bongo, Adobe After Effects
Today, we are incredibly mobile:
There are more and more freelancers - some big tech companies have 50% freelancers. Even if we are not freelancers, our job asks us to work across offices.Within the office, we are also more mobile than before as the ratio of teamwork is streaming up. We don’t stay at our desk anymore.
Within this context, I start to wonder how can we still have a sense of belonging while we keep moving on and on? I think this sense of belonging can come from our belongings.
catalog: personal artifacts at workspace
Now the boundary between our working life and living life is blurring.
Sometimes, it gets tiring to carry our personal items back and forth between the office and home. Besides, we might work in a different office, and move between cities. At the same time, our apartments can be quite small.
We don’t have to compromise the quality of our life, because:
We can shift some home storage to our workspace. We can establish a bus system to rotate the artifacts across the offices in the city, and share some with other people instead of possessing everything
For us as individuals, we might change our location at a small distance every time. Over the time we end up utilizing the whole working space, instead of always locked in one corner with no knowledge of what’s going on across the building.