Smart Upgrades for Your Living Space
With the smart furniture market just in its infancy, the possibilities for sleek, stylish, and smart furniture pieces are virtually limitless. Welcome to the home of the future! The question is: how excited are you to move in? Maybe these innovations will get you even more excited!
The International Data Tracker (IDC) for smart home devices shows that the global market for smart gadgets grew 11.7% in 2021 compared to the previous year. As the world adjusts to the impacts of the global pandemic in 2020, more people have adapted to work-from-home setups and have embraced the home to be more than just a place to land at the end of a busy day. Home, is in fact, the new hub for daily activities for a lot of us.
It makes sense for smart gadgets to spill over into the furniture space, not just the home appliance space, as more and more of our digital devices become fixtures of the home.
Experts say this is because more people want their spaces to do more for them. A living room is not just a place to rest, but a space to explore creative activities and pursue side hustles. Not everyone has a big house, so maximizing the space we do have and matching the rooms with our various activities take center stage in our post-pandemic world.
People also want to minimize clutter and reduce having to deal with multiple wires for the many gadgets we have at home. Incorporating charging ports into our sofas, beds, chairs, and tables is just one example of smart furniture. In 2022, several brands took this concept and really ran with it.
For people with disabilities, smart furniture can make navigating around their own spaces more comfortable. Assistive furniture is another area that may allow smart furniture to move into and expand. According to FactMR, there’s a growing market there, expected to grow into a valuation of $5.5B by 2026.
Making our daily activities easier and more seamless has inspired smart furniture to emerge. Smart furniture technology is described by Science Focus as “houseware with technological functionalities” such as LED mirrors with hidden speakers and a charging port, or a bedside table that’s also a speaker, like this one from Dunelm.
Popular luxury audio company Bang & Olafsen took it one step further with their modular yet posh wall-mounted speaker system. Is it art? Is it furniture? Is it a hi-tech speaker system? It ticks all these boxes! These are speakers demanding to be seen and not just heard.
Speakers, charging stations for our digital gadgets, and lamps and lighting fixtures seem to be the jumping point for smart furniture in its early days. The need to infuse our daily activities with music and information, our constant need to always be plugged in with a full charge on all our devices, and accessibility to light so we can keep working even the sun has long set have determined our furniture need these upgrades to make us more comfortable at home.
A company based in Vancouver called Gryphon Development is busy with a project that seeks to determine and further smart furniture technology. In an interview with ctvnews.com, its marketing manager man Leung says that the company is looking to explore spaces in the home and how to creatively utilize the space with these smart pieces of furniture.
Leung says, “People are looking for a space that could satisfy their different needs in daily life. There’s so much more they want to be done in their homes now. The definition of home has been elevated to a different level.”
As tech companies such as Xiaomi develop smart home apps that bring together control of most of their smart gadgets, design companies and tech companies are coming together to come up with sleek and stylish pieces that seamlessly incorporate the conveniences of a smart gadget with our tables, chairs, and even beds. Check out this bed with a built-in smart TV that pops up from its foot.
Want upgrades like these for your home? Tech writer Marc Saltzman offers some sound advice. Look for the Four C’s.
As our work and personal lives further intertwine, innovations try to keep up with meeting our daily requirements to be able to function more efficiently, even if, and maybe especially when most of our activities are done inside our homes. What new requirement will smart furniture be able to address next?
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