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

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.