Transformable Furniture

I love buildings. I also love the insight of buildings even though the facades usually catch my attention first and draw me into the object.

However, as soon as I walk into the space I am pulled towards the interiors and their connection to the atmosphere of the room.

A good building isn’t dependent on the quality of the interiors since its rooms can work by themselves without any addition. Nevertheless, good furniture can improve buildings tremendously and add some extra spice to the existing structures.

Back in the days, one of my favourite activities as a child was a visit to Ikea with my family. The closest furniture store of the brand used to be in Hamburg, which would be roughly 1 hour away from our home. Going on the trip was an adventure in itself, not only because the whole family would go somewhere together, but also because it would be the entrance into a new world — the world of imagination.

Entering an Ikea store was like a treasure hunt. You would start by exploring all these different little worlds that employees had set up to show the different objects in potential real life scenarios. Thereby, you could walk through a physical representation of the firm’s printed catalogue and dive right into inspiration. Knowing that we planned on buying a lot of the presented pieces also didn’t hurt the experience.

Even today, I realize myself getting excited when entering a furniture store, a gallery or even browsing an e-commerce where I can look for objects to transform my home. It seems like the outlook to design your future living conditions provide a satisfying, even exciting scenario that creates stimulation in the mind.

One problem, when buying furniture, lies in the functional essence of most products. Objects are usually designed for a specific purpose and can usually not be transformed into other objects enabling new possibilities. A chair for example is mostly designed for sitting and a table is normally created to put items on it. There aren’t many pieces of furniture that can be used for different needs and therefore a customer generally ties himself to the usage of the bought object.

As life in today’s world tends to get more flexible and agile, the subjects in a humans personal life should start to respond to this and evolve into more flexible matters as well. This can be applied to different aspects of people’s environment, but becomes particularly obvious when looking at furniture in an apartment or other types of spaces.

To me, it is an essential requirement for new products already to be a part of the circular economy, meaning that commodities need to be created in a way that they can also be recycled and used to create something else. Taking this need one step further, I think that products need to be enabled to change in usage and application.

The main idea behind the extension of circular economy products, furniture in particular, focusses on creating and producing objects that can fulfill different usages at the same time. I am thinking about three main aspects as defining attributes for transformable furniture (TF):

This catalogue of requirements should function as a guideline when conceptualizing ideas as it creates some sort of a framework to come up with creative solutions.

My vision of transformable furniture goes beyond just pieces that work independently for themselves, but includes multifunctional living constructs that could be combined or connected in order to form smaller or bigger structures. In this case, a piece of furniture is not seen as a unique object that has no link to other items in the space — it rather evolves into different forms when connected to other objects.

There are already various projects in today’s world that deal with the idea of transformable furniture or at least objects in living spaces that can vary in their application and handling. You can find multiple concepts online and a lot of ideas in thesis projects at art schools. Most of these works usually include fictional approaches based on specific problem constellations, but they sometimes lack realistic execution possibilities.

To me, it is important to find a starting point for the creation of transformable furniture that provides a realistic possibility for the acceleration of the movement. I could imagine a signature object that would be a great addition to any household such as a chair that can be a table for example. It seems essentiell to me that an object used in everyday life functions as the enabler for later ideas & visions. The goal should be a product portfolio of furniture that can transform a room into another space without adding any additional pieces. Imagine a living room turning into a bed room just by moving a few parts of the objects in the space.

This would not only simplify life for a lot of people, it would also enable the maximization and optimization of used space — a highly important need for current beings and future generations ahead. Moreover, these objects would be an ideal amendment to the current rise of co-living, micro housing or the general trend of mindful resource usage.

It’s call for all product designers:

I am excited to see what lies ahead of us. What if you would take this approach even one step further and direct it towards moving or fluid furniture. If you add a technology layer to theses objects, the game would change even more as real interconnectivity in the 21st century arises when building digital bridges between piers. The options are somewhat limitless as long as the physical appearance of products is used as the foundation.

I can’t wait — Let’s get started!

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