There has never been (or will ever really be) anything glamorous about a bedsit. But in the same breath you could probably say there will never be anything spacious about these single room occupancies. This could be about to change with the introduction of CityHOME, a new 200 square foot “micro-dwelling” from MIT Media Lab's Changing Places team.

The team describe it is as "an all-in-one disentangled robotic furniture piece [that] makes it possible to live large in a tiny footprint by not only magically reconfiguring the space but also serving as a platform for technology integration and experience augmentation."

It's basically the Swiss army knife of interior design; fitting a bed, work space, dining room table (with seating for 6), kitchen surface, cooking range, closet and multi-purpose storage area into a wardrobe-sized cube, all on low-friction rollers, so it can be easily moved a few feet in any direction to extend or compress a given room. And if this wasn't futuristic enough, each element is controlled through gestures, touch, and voice control, meaning you simply point at the bed and out it comes.

It's interesting to see design and tech's attempts to accommodate and adapt to emerging living requirements. As more people migrate to cities, what does this mean for how we live and what we expect from our homes?

CityHOME is still only a prototype but the project’s lead researcher Kent Larson has every intention of bringing it to market through either a startup or a commercial sponsor. There might be life in the old bedsit yet...