In the course of your futuristic walk from the front door of your company office to your desk, you’ll be greeted by a few colleagues plus an HD TV screen, your computer, your digital calendar, and your desk.
The screen is a shared, wall-mounted tablet hung in the hallway, and it’s digitally noting your arrival by pinging your smartphone, declaring you as available for any impromptu meeting your boss may call. Your computer is like a pet you keep at work, always happy to see you with the daily news on hand. Your calendar is a two-way video conference link that idles with the day’s schedule on display.
And your desk–well, your desk can sense your slightly accelerated heartbeat through your smartwatch and knows to tilt your chair back a few extra degrees to soothe what it anticipates are gym-worn muscles.
It’s a smooth, seamless start to the day, made possible by the smart office furniture that is slowly making its way into offices in the U.S. and beyond.
Smart office furniture will instead embed digital connections into the world you walk through, work in, and frequent daily. This Internet of Things technology makes it possible for the furniture and devices around you to send signals to the internet in order to interact with, and potentially control, anything else that can reach the internet.
It’s the tech behind fridges that make grocery lists, washing machines that reorder their own laundry detergent, and smart speakers that let you dim the lights by voice command. When these objects enter the workforce, however, they must ditch the frivolous in favor of the functional. They have to schedule meetings when you’re not even there to check your emails. They must recognize you by your digital trail and set the room up to suit your personal preferences. And, they must blend into your surroundings to make the whole thing run smoothly.
Smart Office Furniture Through IoT
A smart desk that can communicate with you is already available for purchase. New York firm Humanscale has placed sensors in its desk and chairs that can monitor how long a user has been sitting or standing at their workstation. The idea is to encourage users to change their position frequently in order to increase blood flow and stave off heart conditions and high blood pressure. The furniture is powered by a discrete sensor capable of monitoring its surroundings, and it’s not hard to imagine a time when that sensor will not only alert the user but connect to their chair and subtly manipulate it to encourage the right posture.