An Adaptive Office Layout as a Medium to Promote Workers' Health and Wellbeing

Workplace attendance is struggling since before the pandemic as many employees suffer from the generic and busy environment in which they were supposed to work. The currently dominant “flexible” office made up of moveable furniture is unable to host these post-pandemic expectations because the presence and activities of workers is too unpredictable for office facility teams to constantly adapt for. As automatic vacuums and mowers already demonstrate, it is yet becoming increasingly feasible and affordable to integrate miniaturised mobile robotic technology in everyday office furniture that could actively adapt its layout configuration. This project therefore investigates how the currently prevalent ‘flexible’ workplace can be shifted towards an “adaptive” workplace: a workplace that increases the occupational health and wellbeing of workers by proactively changing its spatial configuration via mobile robots. 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 workers as they are more actively invited to utilise the architectural affordances that are optimal for the actual context of that particular workplace, for that particular moment. This scientific objective can only be overcome by solving three multidisciplinary challenges, as we need to determine how workplace context can be captured and predicted; how a more healthy and engaging workplace configuration can be modelled; and how such an ideal configuration can be robotically actuated.