Manifesting Architectural Subspaces with Two Mobile Robotic Partitions to Facilitate Spontaneous Office Meetings

TL;DR

Open-plan offices incur visual/auditory/privacy distractions that hinder focus. The authors test two wizarded mobile robotic partitions that autonomously manifest enclosed subspaces using four strategies (baseline, two adaptations, two nudges) in real workgroups. Results show partial reductions in distractions but reveal new disturbances; indirect spatial cues are generally preferred over gestural nudges. The study offers design guidelines for robotic furniture, emphasizing alignment of form and function, fair balancing of multiple workers, and the use of architectural affordances to convey intent, with implications for adaptive architecture and human–robot collaboration in workspaces.

Abstract

Although intended to foster spontaneous interactions among workers, a typical open-plan office layout cannot mitigate visual, acoustic, or privacy-related distractions that originate from unplanned meetings. As office workers often refrain from tackling these issues by manually demarcating or physically relocating to a more suitable subspace that is enclosed by movable partitions, we hypothesise that these subspaces could instead be robotically manifested. This study therefore evaluated the perceived impact of two mobile robotic partitions that were wizarded to jointly manifest an enclosed subspace, to: 1) either `mitigate' or `intervene' in the distractions caused by spontaneous face-to-face or remote meetings; or 2) either `gesturally' or `spatially' nudge a distraction-causing worker to relocate. Our findings suggest how robotic furniture should interact with office workers with and through transient space, and autonomously balance the distractions not only for each individual worker but also for multiple workers sharing the same workspace.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: (Left) The open-plan layout of the workspace in the baseline condition, featuring three separate office desks, one window and one door. Two strategically positioned cameras captured the behaviour of the participants throughout the study. (Right) Photos of the workspace showcasing the open-plan layout without any robotically manifested subspace.
• Figure 2: The robotic partitions adopted a similar design to that of Nguyen et al. Nguyen2024. (a) Each robotic partition featured a 180*210*28 cm lightweight aluminium frame that houses a customised robotic configuration. (b) The frame carried two acoustic panels and wooden cladding and incorporated handles for manual manoeuvring, emergency stop buttons, and a small LCD screen. Notably, two extrinsically-positioned LiDAR laser scanners were required to ensure a 360-degree field of view around its perimeter. (c) A web-based interface enabled the researcher to select a predefined position, to which each robotic partition could autonomously navigate.
• Figure 3: The adaptation strategy conditions consisted of one baseline (B) condition, whereby no subspace was manifested; three intervention (IA1-3) subspaces that manifested around the participant holding a remote meeting; and two mitigation (MA1-2) subspaces that manifested around the shared space of the two participants doing focused work activities. One particular mitigation subspace could not be implemented due to the limited space constraints in this workspace.
• Figure 4: (Top) The gestural nudging (GN) strategy consisted of one robotic partition performing a 'swaying' motion to encourage the distracting participant engaged in a remote meeting to enter the intervention subspace. (Bottom) The spatial nudging (SN) strategy gradually manifested a transient subspace that regulated the visual and physical access between two participants conducting a face-to-face meeting to encourage participants to initiate and conclude the meeting.
• Figure 5: Example of the study procedure as experienced by Group 4 (G4): The study began with the remote meeting scenario, starting with the baseline layout, followed by three different strategies. It then progressed to the face-to-face meeting scenario, which also began with a baseline layout where participants had no visual or physical access to one another, followed by two spatial nudging strategies.