Imagine staying in a Shanghai hotel bedroom in 2050?

Abstract

Will the future hotels of Shanghai emphasise a world of contemporary design, sustainability and technological innovations in order to deal with the growing pains of pollution, competition of urban land and decreasing availability of clean water, which will impact on the quality and price of accommodation in  the city? This paper imagines what a hotel might look like in 2050 based upon nine drivers of change, whether it is new sciences such as claytronics, or programmable matter that integrate sight, sound and feel into original ideas, allowing users to interact with three-dimensional form. The applications of claytronics would be the reconfiguration of everything, so just imagine the future hotel bed that could change its degree of comfort from a hard to a soft mattress without too much effort, the possibilities are endless. Other drivers include robotics as an alternative to a human labour supply or the behaviours of  Generation Y. The heart to the future is sustainable design and this paper discusses how the hotel will feature many of these changes in a future world in order to mitigate and adapt to a paradigm of scarcity of resources.

Keywords: drivers of change, future hotels, innovations, sustainability, sustainable design

Research in Hospitality Management 2012, 1(2): 85–95