Your Future Office?

Pocket Library

Flexible e-ink screens, as easy on the eyes as newsprint, will wirelessly grab the documents you need when you enter a meeting. You can then unfurl them on the train or switch over to the newspaper. Researchers at Dutch company Polymer Vision have created flexible circuitry that bonds to displays at low temperatures so that screens can bend without melting or breaking. Now they’re working on circuits for high-resolution 8-by-11-inch displays.

Transparent Monitors

Go ahead, stare out the window—it’s also your monitor. Displays can already be 75 percent transparent when turned off, thanks to thin electroluminescent films called organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. Universal Display Corporation in New Jersey and others are developing see-through conductive materials to replace the last visible part: the grid of circuits that delivers power to pixels.

Cordless Power

Snip the last cords on your desk. Wireless “power strips,” developed by Pennsylvania-based Powercast, transmit energy from an outlet as radio waves. Add-on chips for low-power devices, such as cellphones, convert those waves into electricity when the items come within a few feet. The first products debut this year.

Friendly Locks

No more fumbling with passwords, ID cards or keys. In roughly five years, your desk will recognize you by looking at your face. Hidden cameras snap photos as you walk in, compare them to a database of users, and unlock laptops, doors and personal data. To make sure new facial hair or dim lighting doesn’t throw the system off, University of Tennessee researchers and others are investigating 3-D images that focus on difficult-to-change bone structure.

Never Lose Another Memo

Soon, staples won’t just keep papers together—they’ll make sure you keep them, period. As RFID tags shrink in price and size, Swingline wants to embed them in staples so that lost documents can radio their location to a tracking device

The Revolution Door

Here’s how the natural energy cycle works: the sun creates energy when it causes the plants to grow, the plants create energy when they’re eaten by animals, the animals and the plants create energy when they’re consumed by people, and then the people create energy when they do things like open doors. That’s sort of the idea, anyway, and it’s one that New York architectural designers Carmen Trudell and Jenny Broutin have tried to express through their design firm, FLUXXlab. They have created several clever devices designed to convert human energy into electricity, and to educate people on their place within the energy cycle.  

Loftbox 101 provides office privacy... in a box

Nowadays any hip office worth its salt will eschew the traditional partitions or cubicles in favor of open plan office setups – preferably in a converted warehouse or loft. That’s great for encouraging communication (work-related of course) between employees, but what about when some privacy is required, whether it be for a meeting or just to avoid that annoying guy from accounting? Enter the Loftbox 101, a mobile rectangular box from Atelier Graff that unfolds to form a table with high backed facing chairs for private conversations.

Made of 20 glass reinforced plastic components glued to a metal frame the Loftbox 101 sits atop sixteen rollers that allow it to be easily moved around. The rollers have a soft tread for hard floors with the option of hard treads for soft floors. The seats are comprised of polyurethane foam and polyester wadding under a leather cover, while the floor of the unit is made of sandwich panels with a textile cover.

In one of the two fold out elements to the side of the seats is a TFT ActiveMatrix monitor for visual presentations (or for catching up on the soaps at work), with a cable connection in the table making it easy to hook up a laptop to the monitor.

Closed the unit measures 250 cm x 200 cm and folds out to a size of 270 cm x 288.4 cm, with the seat backs reaching a height of 142.4 cm. The Loftbox 101 also comes in a variety of color combinations.