AWARD YEAR
2017
CATEGORY
Home
GOALS
Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure
KEYWORDS
Smart Home, furniture
COUNTRY
China
DESIGNED BY
Hiroshi Ishii, Jifei Ou, Daniel Tauber and Lining Yao - Tangible Media Group and MIT Media Lab
WEBSITE
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/jamsheets/
reForm - jamSheets
A formal and functional adaptive furniture: from a carpet to a table to a chair and back.
When laid flat, reForm looks like a standard rug: thin and totally flat, flush directly with the floor. But the sheet is actually an adjustable interface built with a kind of “layer jamming” technique that can transform it from soft and pliable—able to be set in nearly any configuration—to completely stiff, where it holds that shape. This adaptive plane can become a chair or a table in a few moments—or simply stay underfoot.
The furniture contains multiply layers of sandpaper and an airtight fabric enclosure. The sandpaper is sealed in the fabric. Through a tubing, a quiet vacuum pump i connected to the furniture. Electrodes are embedded in the sandpaper layers to detect human touch. Touching both ends of the furniture will trigger the pump to vacuum the air and thus stiffen the furniture; touching only one end will release the negative air pressure and thus make the piece soft.