Imagine buying a new chair from Ikea. You bring the flat box home and open it up. But instead of grabbing a hex wrench and kissing your weekend goodbye, you pop a bottle of wine, sit back, and watch the chair grow from a flat piece of wood right in front of your eyes.
This is the possibility of what University of Stuttgart researchers are calling HygroShape. It’s flat-packed wooden furniture that, over the course of about 8-12 hours of sitting in your home, can become a solid chair or chaise lounge. While this is cutting-edge research, the first buy-able products will hit this spring from a company called Hylo Tech.
“Hylo Tech” is something of a nod at “high low tech,” which is how the aptly named researcher Dylan Wood describes his team’s new technology (Wood co-founded Hylo Tech with Laura Kiesewetter). Today, most wood furniture sold by Ikea involves obliterating a tree into sawdust, then using glue to bind the wood back together into various shapes. More exciting, 3D-printed wood—which just debuted last year—works in largely the same way. An inkjet prints tiny bits of sawdust and binder into shapes.