Nanoplastics: how "intelligent" materials may change our homes.

New, "smart" materials called nanoplastics will create an amazing array of interactive gadgets for the home.

Picture, if you will, a chair that automatically adjusts its shape and temperature for each user, walls that change color and texture at your whim, and a display screen where objects

No, it's not The Jetsons. It's nanoplastics--the theoretical fusion of traditional plastics and the developing field of nanotechnology, in which microscopic machines and other objects are constructed atom by atom.

The hypothetical field of nanoplastics represents a new conceptual landscape for product design in the home--one in which the home of tomorrow is a system of truly intelligent, adaptive, self-organizing products. Charles Owen, a professor of product design and the director of the Design Processes Laboratory at the Illinois Institute of Technology, along with a team of graduate and undergraduate design students, has come up with some hypothetical applications for nanoplastics in the home of the future. Utilizing a Silicon Graphics workstation and Alias software, Owen and his students have created some computer-generated representations of possible nanoplastic products.

The potential of such hypothetical nanoplastic products is amazing. Computers the size of a blood cell would be contained within nanoplastic materials, giving objects enormous processing power ("intelligence"). Sensors and emitters would be constructed to absorb and transmit pressure, sound, and nearly the entire electromagnetic spectrum. These would provide nanoplastic materials with the ability to sense their surroundings and to respond with physical change or the transmission of sound, light, heat, or other emissions.

Here are some potential elements of the nanoplastic household:

The Infrastructure

Architiles: The building blocks of the infrastructure of the entire home system are "architiles," tiles with built-in flexibility and intelligence. Their main four-ply design consists of a surface layer of variable texture, a power plane beneath that, a computing and communications layer farther down, and finally a honey-combed section whose interior walls can be broken down as needed to channel materials and fluids from source to destination.

Users can select architiles with the facing skins appropriate to the project. The facing skin--the top-most layer of the tile--can have many different functions. Wall skins can create different wall colors and patterns; sensing skins can pick up acoustic, thermal, and visual energy and dampen or strengthen their output accordingly; floor skins can create durable floor colors and patterns; wall-transforming skins can control the moving, deforming, and changing of wall functions; and interface skins can provide access to internal and external communication systems.

The placement of facing skins and their configurations is not permanent. A facing skin can be easily peeled off and replaced with another.

The Kitchen

Foodware: Traditional bowls and dishes hardly exist in the future kitchen. At your request, a foodware bowl senses the presence of food and forms itself up from the countertop into various dish shapes suitable for preparing, cooking, or serving. The bowl can either keep food warm or keep it preserved without the need for a refrigerator.

Wet island: You can place your pots and pans with their baked-on stains atop the permeable, wavelike surface of the wet island, and then watch them sink down into a bath of scrubbing nanoplastic detergent. The wash plane in the center cleans individual dishes as you pass them under its arc. The architiles supplying water to the wet island's central compartment also channel water to support indoor plants.

The Living Area

Dining table: At your command, the table can be raised to simplify setting and lowered for dining. Overall table size can be altered in order to increase or decrease seating capacity. The surface of the table can heat or cool serving containers as needed. Heating and cooling will occur only underneath the containers. Being connected to the architiles in the floor, the table can also provide water or other beverages directly to a dispenser placed on the table.

Chairs: Expanding the capabilities and comfort of seating is an ideal application of nanoplastics. Because of the ability of nanoplastics to vary flexibility and elasticity, many types of seating surfaces can be created. A very thin "sheet" surface can perform like a high-back cushion. The nanoplastic material can create any pattern or texture desired, as well as reshaping the structure of the chair itself to assist in the process of rising or sitting, or simply for aesthetic reasons. And because thermal comfort levels vary significantly among people of different ages, the chair can heat and cool itself as desired. Chairs will even remember the preferences of the home's regular inhabitants.

The Explore Room

An interactive, multisensory media center, this room is used primarily as an educational environment. However, it can also function as an exercise area, entertainment room, or general work space. Some of its elements include:

The Sculptor: This is a device that uses nanoassemblers to construct physical objects out of a substance known as Nanoclay, a thin-walled shell of nanoplastic capable of rapidly changing form. Objects can be created by manipulating the clay by hand or with a special tool for finer detail. For example, as the tool is passed near the clay, corners can be sharpened, and the opacity and materials characteristics of it changed. As the Nanoclay object is being formed manually, its three-dimensional image can be holographically projected nearby, changing simultaneously with the actual object.

PADscreens: Phased-array display screens (PADscreens) have full multimedia sound, as well as imaging and sensory processes, and can be used as flat-panel displays or be curved to surround viewers. Forming the base of each screen is a small-diameter, deformable tube that can be formed into curves. The stiff, paper-thin screen is extended upward in the shape of the base, expanding to wall height for normal presentations or shrinking to notebook height for desktop use.

PADscreens can produce different types of three-dimensional images. It can appear as if you are looking through a window at a real scene. Using its front-projection mode, a PADscreen can also make objects appear to be coming out of the screen or in front of it.

The Aqua Room

The sink: By touching different zones on the console surface, you can adjust the flow rate and temperature of the water, as well as the width of the water plane, forming anything from a wide sheet to a concentrated jet. A top-lighted mirror displays magnifications, as well as ordinary reversed and true nonreversed images.

The toilet: In addition to being heated, the toilet seat conforms to a variety of users, from the young toddler-trainer to the elderly. The whole structure is light enough to be moved by a single person, yet can forge a sturdy bond to the architiles wherever it is positioned.

The shower: Drawing water up the architiles through its support planes, the shower distributes it into two screens and then out through repositionable showerhead "discjets." The screens expand to create a larger wash space, while fabric seats can be scrolled up and out of the way. In storage, the screens roll up inside the support planes, and the discjets are lodged in compartments on the support plane's inner surface.

The nanoplastic home of tomorrow will be designed as a total system rather than a collection of individual appliances. Smart, responsive nanoplastic products will communicate with each other and with users, thus significantly increasing the capabilities and flexibility of products used in the home, according to Owens and the nanoplastics design team. The potential gain for homeowners, they believe, will be an enormous boost in the quality of life.

Kevin McGuinness is a staff editor of THE FUTURIST.

For more information, contact: Charles Owen, Design Processes Laboratory, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, 10 West 35th Street, 13th Floor, Chicago, Illinois 60616. Telephone 312/808-5309.