Robotic furniture to improve liveability

What We're Clicking On – June 20th, 2019

In our weekly news filter, we share the most interesting articles related to technology and the future of cities and buildings.

After introducing furniture-as-a-service, IKEA continues to innovate and showcases several solutions that should help residents to face the challenges that come with living in the city, caused by megatrends such as growing urbanization, aging population, soaring housing prices and a lack of natural resources. Together with developer Ikano Bostad IKEA launched Space10, a research and design lab to improve sustainability and livability. Besides, IKEA works together with various startups such as Ori and Bumblebee Spaces to launch a series of solutions for small space living: furniture combinations that can be minimized when they aren’t used and a solution to use the ceiling to store furniture when not needed. Watch the video about ROGNAN robotic furniture and read more here.

Car data for safety

Lately some discussion have been going on about data ownership of data car drivers are sharing. Several car manufacturers, service providers and governments have agreed to join forces to share data from cars and the infrastructure in order to improve car and road safety. The European Data Task Force, as the group calls itself, is already joined by the governments of several European countries (among others The Netherlands, Germany and Spain), service providers such as TomTom and HERE Technologies, as well as car manufacturers BMW, Ford, Mercedes and Volvo. The collected data is available for free for non-commercial parties. Commercial parties that want to use the data, have to pay for it. Car drivers will have the opportunity to opt-out of data sharing. Find more information here.