So, how does your bed make itself?
There definitely are a lot of unusual projects out there being developed by the Kickstarter community, and one of the more recent ones is Smartduvet, a system that purportedly makes your bed for you.
Whilst it’s yet to be determined how effective this system turns out to be, the mechanics of how it functions is quite interesting. The basics of the setup is an inflatable airbag lattice that is automatically inflated to unroll the duvet into a flat “board” and then deflate to resume a natural duvet form. In this way it reminds me a lot of the concept of 4D Printing that Skylar Tibbits outlines in his TED talk below.
These techniques, of course, are much more advanced and less commercially ready than the approach the Smartduvet takes, but both projects can serve as inspiration that products can be designed with animation in mind. Possibilities can stretch beyond home assistance into fashion, adventure sports, and automotive applications just to begin with. When we no longer consider that objects need to be static, or strictly mechanical, and that they can move, and be powered, in a more organic ways, a new thought process for product design is opened up.
Check out the Smartduvet Kickstarter page from the link below.
