I've started to sleep on the floor (better said, on two or three blankets on the floor) a year ago because I've read somewhere it helps with back aches. The first week was weird and uncomfortable, but I got used to it quickly.
I've never slept that well (frequent sleepless nights before switchting to the ground) and my aches almost vanished.
I got rid of my bed since I didn't need it anymore and realized how much space it took (I live in a single room in a shared appartment). Now my smallish room seems so much bigger, I literally can't even use all that space efficiently (I live quite minimalistic).
Sure, this isn't for everyone, but overall I can't stop thinking that something I took for granted (everyone needs a bed, right?) is in fact nothing but an accessoire that, in retrospect, even decresed my quality of sleep, therefore even my quality of life.
Do you sleep in the same spot every night? I'm chuckling at the idea of you getting tired and just picking a random bit of floor within your house to lie down.
You made me laugh, thanks! I do have three blankets (on which I sleep) that I store in my closet during the day. Most of the time I put my bed on the same spot, but sometimes I move it slightly (towards the windows on hot days, etc.), although not that much.
I slept on the floor for 6 years, only getting a bed several months after I bought my house. No furniture either other than two fold out tables for old Unix work stations and a bean bag.
It’s an excellent method of birth control; no bed that is. The work stations don’t help either.
> I've started to sleep on the floor (better said, on two or three blankets on the floor) a year ago because I've read somewhere it helps with back aches. The first week was weird and uncomfortable, but I got used to it quickly.
> I've never slept that well (frequent sleepless nights before switchting to the ground) and my aches almost vanished.
> I got rid of my bed since I didn't need it anymore and realized how much space it took (I live in a single room in a shared appartment). Now my smallish room seems so much bigger, I literally can't even use all that space efficiently (I live quite minimalistic).
> Sure, this isn't for everyone, but overall I can't stop thinking that something I took for granted (everyone needs a bed, right?) is in fact nothing but an accessoire that, in retrospect, even decresed my quality of sleep, therefore even my quality of life.
Do you sleep directly on the floor with no padding whatsoever? I tend to sleep on my side or stomach and have never been able to sleep well on a bare floor.
I sleep on 2-3 blankets, so a little padding. But too much padding gets uncomfortable for me. Let me try to elaborate what I think I learned during the past year. But take it with a grain of salt, it's just subjective perception:
I slept on my side or stomach most of my life, it was the only comfortable way to sleep for me. I started to sleep on the ground just like that and guess what, the first nights were horrible. Once I started to sleep in different positions, everything changed. My theory is that there is no real feedback on a mattress/very soft ground. I can sleep like I want and it will be comfortable, even though it might be "bad sleeping posture". If I do the same on the ground, there is no padding, my body gets real feedback and reacts with pain in bad "sleeping postures". But what does the pain tell me? In one way: Sleeping on the floor is bad because it hurts. In another way: My way of sleeping is bad because it hurts, so I need to change it.
An example: Sleeping on the stomach on a mattress is still somewhat "comfy" for me (even though I don't like sleeping on a mattress). Sleeping on the stomach on the ground is a no go, because my weight presses my chest against the ground, making breathing way harder than sleeping on my back with no weight on my chest. I just got so used sleeping on my chest that sleeping on the back was horrible at first, but once I got used to it I felt more replenished the mornings after. So if I sleep on my stomach like in this example, is sleeping on the floor bad because I can't breathe properly, or is sleeping on a mattress bad, because I don't get the necessary feedback to realise it affects my breathing? I guess that is something everyone needs to decide for himself, but for me the answer is: sleeping on a mattress is bad.
How does that affect your romantic relationships? I imagine you're single since you don't mention a co-living situation which would otherwise be relevant. I imagine taking a girl home you without a bed might not be ideal.
Also, does it affect your ability to sleep on a regular bed without issues?
I do have a girlfriend, but she's studying in another city. We see each other almost every weekend and agreed that I visit her place most of the time, since she can't stand sleeping on the floor.
It does affect my ability to sleep on a regular bed a lot (I sleep in her bed when I'm at her place). It's super uncomfortable for me, I don't feel as rested the next morning and she tells me that I am snoring very loudly and frequently in her bed. Sometimes I sleep on her floor as well, and according to her I my snoring almost disappears on the floor.
The biggest problem I have with sleeping on floor is that I have to literally walk on the mattress or blanket in order to lie down or get up, which is just so icky to me.
If that is strange you'd find it stranger to know that I am Indian and sleeping on floor is both tradition and sometimes compulsion due to poverty (though I was never poor). I was fine with it all these years and don't know what changed recently.
Your point that sleeping on the floor is "compulsion due to poverty" is something I started to think about alot since sleeping on the floor. It made me realise how much we ("wealthy people") isolate/distant ourselves from the ground. Sitting on the floor? That's weird, better sit on a chair or the comfy sofa. Sleeping on the floor? Even weirder. Walking barefoot (something I don't to, btw)? Ew thats gross!
But the result (or at least what I can say about myself) is that our range of motion gets worse every year, which ultimately leads to aches, pain and even worse stuff.
If one of the main arguments (that I hear all the time) against sleeping and sitting on the floor is "but you have to get up from the floor all the time, I couldn't do that", I'd argue that proves my point. Altough its might be just a biased gut feeling.
I slept in a sleeping bag on a stone tile floor for 3 weeks as a student when my furnishings hadn't arrived yet. When my bed got there, I still reverted to the floor the first few nights a I had so gotten used to it. I think I could have gone your path, but did not because I required (some) more cleaning (dust on a hard floor is more noticeable), and admittedly out of convention/habits.
Do people really want to live in such slave dwellings? These futuristic minihomes keep popping up in media, but is this really the solution? The people I know who live in small apartments cannot even afford new furniture. I used to live in 25m2 and the last thing I wanted was these automatons.
Based on my UK experiences, people want to live in nice houses, but they will live in whatever they can afford based on how much money the bank is willing to lend them for a mortgage; doesn't matter how badly made or small.
In Stockholm and other cities in Europe, people are more than happy to live in tiny apartments around 30sqm that look like the one in the video. Examples in the best areas of Stockholm downtown: https://www.hemnet.se/bostader?location_ids%5B%5D=925970&loc...
Modern building standards make it extremely likely a fire cannot pass between units (you can never realistically entirely remove it - people occassionally do things like hang sheets off balconies or store tanks of fuel etc). This is before we talk about how many fires are put out by fire brigades before they've fully destroyed a single unit.
Honestly - the risk of a fire in your own apartment is drastically higher than the risk of it being engulfed in a fire caused outside of it.
there are nearly 8 billion of us and we'll cross 9 plenty soon. industrialization, modernization, and globalization have already been driving people into cities for decades. going forward on top of that droughts, famines, hurricanes, floods, etc will increasingly drive climate refugees into cities.
we are already in a "housing crisis" that will only escalate rapidly as pressure from the net-influx of people moving in compresses living space. this is what ikea is talking about in the first minute of this video (which at one point was the link):
https://ikea.today/ikea-explores-future-living-for-the-many/
your mental framework of "why would I, a wealthy person who can afford more, want this?" is basically a mistake of making it about you. its not.
The places with a "housing crisis" are uber-wealthy neighborhoods or cities like SF or London, the crisis is not caused by incoming refugees but by high salaries, and yeah, it's rich people who live in those tiny spaces. Comparatively, poor people live in more affordable neighborhoods.
Even with low friction, you probably need to apply brakes at rest to avoid having it to move uncontrollably at the wrong time. But certainly it could be manual.
By using a motorized motion, you have more freedom in the design, and you can likely move heavier load. Not everyone is necessarily fit enough to push, squat, or reach some part.
But this is a good point and I hope you can use the system without power, because it would suck to sleep on the ground because you have a power outage.
Braking could certainly be done without motors by requiring a handle to be squeezed while moving. With heavier loads I might see the point in using motors, but I think a few pulleys could do the trick as well.
My point is mostly that the robotic part seems to be slapped on to make the whole thing seem more futuristic, when in reality it is just a clever design for a folding bed.
Getting the friction down far enough that they could get the thing rolling would also mean low enough friction to store a ton of momentum and roll it over someone's foot. This thing probably masses ten times as much as any manually-actuated compact furniture I've seen.
On top of that, consider accessibility. I'd be mostly fine hauling this around, but I know some people that weigh literally half what I do and others with joint or coordination issues. They would have trouble.
Finally, this system is probably going to last way longer. Humans are really awful at using things carefully, while a mechanical engineer with some servos can control exactly where the force is. The "grease the rails and push" plan is great for getting it started, but then you've dumped a bunch of energy into the system and it'll have to be dissipated by running the thing into a physical stop, which is a recipe for vibration and stress that'd shake it to pieces in months. A controlled system can move the unit smoothly and carefully slow it down at the end of travel. I bet this is cleanly in Vimes Theory of Boots territory.
Right. Lots of big libraries have these, to save space, and while I guess they need a strong floor, moving a ton of books by hand seems to be no problem.
This is the future for upper middle class urbanites who could easily afford better, but can't abide living somewhere that isn't chic... the depressing future is for everyone else, and it probably looks like hives of Japanese-style capsule hotels 3d printed from recycled garbage.
Although the video depicts tiny one-room apartments, the second market for this is people who'd like some extra space without the cost and inconvenience of extending their house or moving house.
i.e. if you're willing to pay $2000 to get space for a home office or exercise space, that'll get you a pretty fancy folding bed - but it's a fraction of the cost of an extra bedroom.
You don’t need something robotic but I expect folding beds (especially outside the most expensive cities) see a lot of use in guest bedrooms and similar. A traditional bed sort of locks a room into a guest bedroom function even if it’s rarely used as such. Better to have a sofa bed of some sort and use it for whatever purpose most of the time.
