Transform: The Shape-Shifting Furniture by Hiroshi Ishii

Winner of the Platinum A' Design Award, Transform breaks the boundaries of conventional furniture design.

Transform is not just a piece of furniture, but a dynamic machine driven by streams of data and energy. It is comprised of three dynamic shape displays that move over one thousand pins up and down in real-time to reshape the tabletop into a dynamic, tangible display. The kinetic energy of the viewers, captured by sensors, drives the wave motion represented by the dynamic pins.

The design challenge was to balance technical constraints with the communication of high-level concepts through unique aesthetics. The final construction was made from a laminated and painted MDF structure, aluminum base and external supports, and a corian top. Transform is a modular construction that can be easily assembled and disassembled.

Transform is a platform based on actuator modules with 2 X 12 styrene pins on an area of 305 X 50.8 mm, which extend up to 100 mm from the surface. Three shape displays, 16 x 24 pins each, cover an area of 406.4 x 610 mm. This uses a total of 1152 actuated pins.

Transform operates in three application modes: Escher, Wave, and Machine. Escher mode interacts with inert passive materials to demonstrate inter-material interactions in an artistic mode of dance. Wave mode allows users to interact through the motion of the hand/arm/body to energize the water. Machine mode is a pre-scripted mode that tells the story of Nature and Machine.

The project started in November 2013 in Cambridge, MA, USA at the MIT Media Lab and was exhibited in April 2014 in Milano, Italy. The underlying research for this design is based on Radical Atoms, a vision of human interaction with dynamic, computationally reconfigurable and transformable shape-changing materials. Transform was created to challenge the conventional notion of static furniture design, thus freeing designers from frozen passive materials to give dynamic form to their ideas.

The design was awarded Platinum in A' Fine Arts and Art Installation Design Award in 2015. This award recognizes world-class, exceptional, and highly innovative designs that showcase unmatched professionalism, genius, and contribute to societal wellbeing. Awarded to the defining aesthetics of an era, they advance the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology, exhibiting transcendent excellence and making the world a better place.