When We Merge The Borders Between Moving and Living
Robots on wheels close the gap between Mobility and Real Estate in the Containerized Mobility Era
“A man’s home is his castle”. Soon, however, customizable containers will replace our homes, and by installing wheels as add-ons at the bottom, we will be able to drive them. Our houses will become a collection of small bits that can be programmed to move autonomously or follow us inside and outside our homes. These flexible units, previously hardcoded constructions, will redefine our collective idea of moving, working, and living together.
Previously, when we drove from home to the office, we could choose/rent a handful of car types from Sedan to Pickup truck, from Minivan to SUV — now since we can bridge the distance with any reasonable part or set of parts from our homes that we can plug easily in another structure, we are able to drive to the company’s office with a space that combines not only our desktop station but also our fridge and cozy light units — similarly, as we, previously connected the camper to our cars and enjoyed some days in nature.
I’m very excited about a future of mobility that is transformative in how we envision the use of a vehicle. Why is a vehicle only as a utilitarian vehicle from going from point A to point B? Why not use it as a mobile office that will give you a beautiful view as you conduct your meeting, or maybe it could be a private part where you can have a special dinner, a meeting or a personal dinner., said Daniela Rus — Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT in a talk with PPF Podcast in a talk with Jeffrey Schnapp, the Chief Visionary Officer of Piaggio Fast Forward
Plugable spaces will blur the line between home and work, between business and leisure. In the post-COVID-19 era, it will feel natural for many people, who left their company offices, to keep a social distance. The workforce may not return full-time. The new type of work from distance, similar to the freelancer’s lifestyle, will build a new ecosystem that will redefine the work/life balance. With time, digital connectivity will affect our physical co-existing. Self-sterilizable, robotized home components designed to rearrange and adjust in seconds for different situations will be able to follow patterns in our habits and react to our needs and goals. They will help us to accomplish daily tasks more quickly, precisely, and successfully. By transforming into easy to produce and repair components, different parts of our homes will become easy to move around to help us accomplish tasks inside, as well, outside our living place. Do we need meeting rooms when we can customize a standard car unit into a quiet, beautiful, and secure space for up to 9 people?
Before 2030, we will see our homes evolving as a technological partner. We will establish collaborative relationships between us and different parts of our house. We will trust these parts because they are improving our lives and are becoming better every day we live together. Equipped with computer vision and different biometrical sensors, they are able to collect data from our behaviours inside and outside the house; measure our current physical and mental health conditions, and together with relevant external public data, they can pair these data with machine learning and give us advice about a situation, or automatically change the mode of the working environment to adapt to our current mood.
The vision for autonomous moving units was firstly introduced by inventions like gita¹ — a robot that follows you outside while you walk. It became the frontier of the containerized mobility era. Designed by Piaggio Fast Forward, a member of the Piaggio Group, the Italian manufacturer of the iconic Vespa scooter, gita introduced a whole new worldview. People are invited to think of their houses as bits and as moving containers that can interact with them.
Numerous companies are introducing technologies and concepts that apply the ‘Lego principle’ to vehicles and houses. Electric batteries are not requiring the shapes that we used to see on the streets. That understanding inspires eBussy² to reimagine the shape of their vehicles and develop components and systems so that every user can personalize and make it unique.
Technology changes our preferences where to live. We will see many people in their youth switching to micro-living and buying Kasita³ tiny houses not only because of the financial and energy efficiency but because they are easily augmented by technologies. But what if the family grows? Modulehousing defines home as an upgradeable platform where we can plug different modules according to our needs with time.
“Imagine making machines that are made out of a wide range of materials, why make a robot just out of metal and hard plastic? Why not use softer materials? Why not use tissue? Why not use food or paper or even ice as the basis of making a robot?”, asks Daniela Rus.
New materials, fabrics, and techniques are augmenting the robots and make them practical and likeable. Hyperfold⁴ introduced a new way of expanding and bending spaces — just by using smart folding principles you can press several points on a container, and it easily folds to a flat state. We will see robots on wheels built with smart fabrics from nanomaterials and responsive polymers that will help them communicate and interact with us and in general to show empathy without necessarily having human faces.
Containers have already changed the world we live in. In 1956 the American truck driver Malcolm Purcell McLean introduced a new form of shipping of goods — an intermodal shipping container. That transformed the shipping industry and global trading as we know. This forced the globalization of our world. Earlier in the 1920s Le Corbusier, one of the greatest architects of modernism who developed Modulor — a system based on human measurements and mathematical human proportions, was about to redefine the cities we live in. He also introduced a vision to massive urban projects for Montevideo and São Paulo in Brazil. May the new trends in the technologies that we develop and test right now re-discover the genius of Le Corbusier and apply them in the digital era? May we see cities built around following robots and customized mobile homes?
Being able to see our vehicle as a place to live in is critical for our society. When the self-driving robot services scale and enter the FinTech and PropTech space; when we start seeing them following with our belongings as we walk around, then we will know that we are at the beginning of the containerized mobility era. Everything from personal lifestyles to family models and work habits will change. As the trend evolves and people apply it in their daily life a new definition of a property, a district, a city will emerge.
