Abstract:

Interior design houses are various and different worldwide. Their classification based on their surfaces usually follows the user’s needs, the expected functions, and the living standards. Their classifications vary from economic, typical level, high standard, and luxurious. Each of these standards has its specific typical living needs among the private area (bedrooms), daily life area (living and dining zones), and services areas (kitchen, bathrooms, and storage). The furniture, furnishing, and related equipment, which serve the functionality of the idealistic spaces, also vary based on the criteria above.

Hence, the everyday life disrupted by the recent pandemic, new norms demanded alternative interior solutions to proceed with multiple functional tasks within the same interior homes. The case is not focusing on one family member, but it overtakes the number of users in the same house despite their occupations – in the educational or professional sectors, creating a pandemonium of life flows, especially in tiny homes.

The current study aims to find innovative, flexible workstations in small homes, to fit the pandemic era lifestyle and functional requirements and needs along with the usual daily life. These flexible workstations were foldable to give room for other functions in the same space, in limited houses. The units should also accommodate the computers/laptops and the paper tasks with appropriate lighting and convenient acoustical treatments.

The paper methodology will follow a comparable applied study for a similar case study of designing the workstation, especially in small spaces. The qualitative approach will etude the human dimensions, classify the different functions and the possible flexibility within small spaces. The proposals should consider the limited budgeting in terms of materials and construction.

The study reaches the preliminary concept design as proposals for such workstations, flexible, innovative, functional, and low budget units. The idea is to fit the different tasks and the diversity in human dimensions simultaneously, along with the small homes’ conditions. The proposal presents the optimal dimensions and the materials specifications in all the possible settings of the designed workstation unit. Worth mentioning that this study allows more applied research to discover the appropriateness of using these workstations and the type of impact they create concerning human uses.

Keywords:

Interior Design, Flexible Furniture, Small Spaces, Small Homes.