Flexible Furniture: A Design Strategy for Multiuse yet Limited Space in the Urban Kampung

Limited space in urban area influences people to maximize every inch of the space when accommodating their spatial needs and activities. However, there are also some temporary yet repetitive events that should be provided, especially in community space. A flexible architecture is considered as a potential strategy in the future. The same amount of space will accommodate various activities; not a flexible space as an open plan, yet a flexible space as a definitive space. Moreover, a flexible architecture is not always about a transformable building or flexible building component but also the flexible furniture. This new design strategy can reduce material resources, energy and space used, making it efficient and environmentally sustained. An experiment of the flexible furniture prototypes in a multipurpose building had conducted to identify the spatial impacts. Three different products are using three different flexible mechanisms; their performances will be compared to study how it influencing space, program, and users. This experiment shows that flexible furniture impacts spatial flexibility in improving space efficiency, specifically from the activity variant, the capacity of space, and the intensity of usage.