Gallery: Wild Shape-Shifting Sofa Can Be Whatever You Want It to Be
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Lift-Bit is a sofa design from Carlo Ratti, who founded MIT’s forward-thinking Senseable City Lab.
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It's not so much one singular sofa as it is several hexagonal, cushioned stools that, when combined, form a honeycomb of a couch. Each modular pillar, designed with help from Swiss furniture company Vitra, contains a motor that adjusts the height of the cushioned unit.
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An app, or capacity sensors within the stool that respond to a hovering hand trigger the pillars' movements up and down.
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Lift-Bit can endlessly reconfigure into a traditional sofa, a series of sofa-nodes, a chaise longue, or a bed. It can even morph into a disco sofa.
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Ratti hopes to see Lift-Bit become part of a more flexible built environment. “Our life, by definition, is changing all the time,” he says. “We want different positions, but architecture is static.”
