Weightless Walls and the Future Office

Author

Yuichiro Takeuchi

Abstract

In this paper we describe how future office environments can benefit from the addition of weightless walls virtual, sound blocking walls created using headsets. We particularly focus on exploring how different interaction techniques can be employed to efficiently create, erase, or edit the layouts of these walls, and envisioning how they could impact the overall office experience. Metaphorically, the end effect of integrating weightless walls into offices is that space will be treated in a way similar to how random access memory is treated in PCs; as a shared resource open to dynamic allocations, and whose usage is periodically optimized in real time according to the collective activities of the occupants. Furthermore, we view weightless walls as harbingers of the emergence of synthetic space the eventual fusion of the architectural environment with the distinctive properties of digital bits.