Orchestrating Adaptive Layout to Promote Wellbeing in The Office

Since it has become more acceptable to choose a place to work, the generic and dense official workplace stands in fierce competition. As automatic vacuums and mowers already demonstrate, it is yet becoming increasingly feasible and affordable to integrate miniaturised mobile robotic technology in everyday furniture. Therefore, this proposal investigates how the currently prevalent ‘flexible’ workplace can be shifted towards an “adaptive” workplace: i.e. a workplace that increases the occupational health and well-being of people by proactively changing its spatial configuration through robotic means. It is based on the premise that a semi-autonomous spatial configuration will be able to nudge new ways of social interaction and communication between people as they are more actively invited to utilise the spatial affordances that are unique for the actual context of that particular workplace, for that particular moment. This scientific objective can only be overcome by solving three multidisciplinary research questions, as we need to determine how workplace context can be captured and predicted; how a healthy and engaging workplace configuration can be modelled; and how such an ideal configuration can be robotically actuated. Within the scope of these research questions, we aim to design and develop a multi-robot infrastructure that can operate robotic furniture to actuate spatial adaptations. The proposed infrastructure will be able to reason each spatial adaptation it realizes via multiple and different types of furniture and determine its actions based on real-time data collection and the occupant-furniture interaction.