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.