The Adaptive Architectural Layout: How the Control of a Semi-Autonomous Mobile Robotic Partition was Shared to Mediate the Environmental Demands and Resources of an Open-Plan Office

TL;DR

This paper investigates how multiple workers can share control of a semi-autonomous mobile robotic partition to mediate environmental demands in open-plan offices. Through a co-design session and a five-week in-the-wild study with 13 participants, the authors identify four spatiotemporal adaptation strategies and six initiation regulating factors that determine when and where adaptations occur. The results show that participants use adaptations to mitigate acoustic, visual, glare, and privacy demands, while social and personal thresholds shape the adoption of these strategies. The work advances human-building interaction by detailing social dynamics, potential paths toward fully autonomous adaptation, and implications for wellbeing and productivity in shared work environments.

Abstract

A typical open-plan office layout is unable to optimally host multiple collocated work activities, personal needs, and situational events, as its space exerts a range of environmental demands on workers in terms of maintaining their acoustic, visual or privacy comfort. As we hypothesise that these demands could be coped by optimising the environmental resources of the architectural layout, we deployed a mobile robotic partition that autonomously manoeuvres between predetermined locations. During a five-weeks in-the-wild study within a real-world open-plan office, we studied how 13 workers adopted four distinct adaptation strategies when sharing the spatiotemporal control of the robotic partition. Based on their logged and self-reported reasoning, we present six initiation regulating factors that determine the appropriateness of each adaptation strategy. This study thus contributes to how future human-building interaction could autonomously improve the experience, comfort, performance, and even the health and wellbeing of multiple workers that share the same workplace.

Figures (14)

• Figure 1: The robotic partition consisted of: (a) an ($180x210x28cm$) aluminium frame that housed a customised robotic configuration. (b) The frame was covered by acoustic panels and wooden cladding. (c) A small integrated LCD display at eye-height conveyed the internal system state. (d) The arrangement of two $LiDAR$ laser scanners enables a $360$-degree field of view to detect any obstacles.
• Figure 2: Top left: The location of the open-plan office on the ground floor of a multi-functional university building. Top right: The architectural layout of the open-plan office. Bottom: Impressions of the architectural interior of the open-plan office.
• Figure 3: During the co-design session, 11 workers bodystormed with the researchers to determine how the robotic partition could potentially ameliorate specific environmental demands in their open-plan office.
• Figure 4: During the co-design session, 11 participants proposed 34 hypothetical adaptations, which were expected to ameliorate five different environmental demands.
• Figure 5: The 43 final adaptations that were integrated in the in-the-wild study were generalised from the 26 unique adaptations that were proposed during the co-design session.