Hypercell Furniture
Following the major design principles derived from the Evolutionary Development Biology which are “Simple to Complex”, “Geometric Information Distribution”, and “On/Off Switch and Trigger”. Here, the research attempted to push the boundary to the extreme. By exhibiting the profound potential and various possibilities of generating multiple furniture functions, it is to support the idea of the feasibility and the applicability of HyperCell as a real-time transformable cubic component. A future scenario proposed here is to envision a coming future that people will go to retails like IKEA to buy these transformable cubes instead of furniture pieces as chairs, tables, beds…etc. With the transformation nature of the HyperCells, it becomes possible to have different settings of parameters and the amount numbers of the HyperCell to create various furniture pieces resulting from the user’s demands. Simply saying, the users can have a chair composed of HyperCells at this moment, and several individual benches in a few hours due to the purpose of spatial usage. It somehow decreases the redundancy of the space with a fixed bedroom, a living room, a reading room…etc. The ultimate goal is that a small footprint of space can sufficiently satisfy all the spatial usages with the solutions of transformable cubes, the HyperCells.
It is not only strictly following the 3 aforementioned principles from Evo-Devo but also the evolutionary fact that all animals are sharing the same gene toolkits. Logic-DNA(L-DNA) and Dimension-DNA(D-DNA) are the two major logic and parameters applied here to generate these variations furniture pieces. The L-DNA is the logic extending of the “True/False” mirror geometric transformation determining the assembly regulations while the D-DNA is the logic of defining the basic component’s shape. Moreover, the D-DNA as the degrees of freedom concerning the physical constraint of the component in order to interact with the users to make the transformation as an emergence behavior.
By tweaking the L-DNA and D-DNA, the research is able to generate different “Species” of furniture which will be exhibited as followings. This tweaking idea simply leads the project to another interesting perspective of the “Evolution” coming from the users’ sides. The HyperCell instruction might suggest certain default settings for certain furniture usage but the user should be able to modify the parameters themselves to create new “Species”. For example, a combination of bed-chair can be evolved(created) by the users’ requirement. However, the end goal of the HyperCell developments is to become a real intelligent building block which can apply not only for the interior but also exterior structural usage which should await to be further explored in the near future.
