MIT And Google Give The Cubicle A Radical, Shape-Shifting Redesign #ArtTuesday

Beautiful design, Via Fastcodesign

The work pods are a glimpse of the self-assembling architecture of the future.

Once heralded as an ingenious design strategy for saving money and fostering collaboration, the open-plan office has fallen from grace. It’s increasingly viewed by employees as a stressful, noisy nuisance, but with real estate prices soaring, it’s not an easy trend for many companies to reverse. That’s why some of the best solutions have been small-scale interventions that reconfigure existing open-plan spaces to fit employees’ needs in the moment.

But ask Skylar Tibbits to design a reconfigurable space for your open office and you’re going to get a whole different animal. That’s what happened after Drew Wenzel, a civil and environmental engineer who is part of the campus development team at Google, met Tibbits and started collaborating with him earlier this year.

Tibbits is the co-director of MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab along with Jared Laucks, where they and a team of researchers work to develop textiles and materials that can be “programmed” to self-construct. Their past work has taken the form of wood that is 3D printed with a particular grain pattern that causes it to transform into specific objects and even furniture when wet, as well as shoes that can be made without human or machine aid, thanks to 3D-printed textiles.

The lab’s latest project brings its wild material experimentation to the everyday office: a wooden pod that lowers down from the ceiling and expands into a temporary work space. Born out of a conversation Tibbits had with Wenzel and others at Google, the transformable workspace offers a real-world application of the lab’s future-focused work.

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