Future living research with IKEA

Thanks to the opportunity to be the exchange student in Europe, I have chance to visit Sweden and Denmark, which is famous for their Nordic design. Due to my interests in IKEA and my curiosity in furniture design, I took a visit especially to the IKEA pop-up kitchen in Stockholm, the HAY HOUSE and the IKEA’s co-design lab SPACE 10 in Copenhagen.

The IKEA pop-up kitchen in central Stockholm

The showroom is temporary but it looks everything fancy and well-decorated. It boasts seven flagship IKEA kitchen, people here could experience everything just like the IKEA department store. While it provide customers a quite different purchase experience, service with more availability, mobility and smoother. For instance, the location in the heart of city could save a lot of time for customers to drop in and make order and it also grows interests for home furniture.

This pop up store also combines e-commerce with personal consultation. Customers can make orders online in these computer booths.

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Hej ! The IKEA x HAY !

Last year, IKEA launched a series of “ YPPERLIG “ with famous Danish design company HAY. Focusing on ” The beauty of basics “, creating furniture with an eye for modern living with affordable design, accessible for everyone. This collaboration bring huge success for both and also symbolise the merge of designer taste with popularisation.

The HAY HOUSE

However, there are various difference between HAY and IKEA. Take products as example, HAY’s products take great focus on their design concept and their specified simple and streamlining product style, while IKEA focuses more on products’ accessibility, variety and also the spirit of maker attitude, which customers could always build furnitures by themselves.

In my opinions, I am fond of both, while it can be said that HAY show us living with design consciousness and IKEA make this possible and influential in our daily life.

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IKEA’s experimental design with SPACE 10

“ Tomorrow’s Meatball “ a visual exploration of the future food project, is my first time to hear from SPACE 10. Then I realise the SPACE 10 is a future-living lab of IKEA and Art Rebels, which purposes to “ Design a better and more sustainable way of living.”

The interior space of SPACE 10 was full-equipped with furnitures from IKEA and was arranged in a creative way, here could find full of inspiration and no-limits chances with open workshops, exhibitions and co-design activities. SPACE 10 gathers people from all the fields as designers, scientists, entrepreneurs, farmers, residences and so on to co-ideate and brainstorm the solutions for a better future living.

The green house lab of SPACE 10, where to nurture kinds of seedling and explore the possibility of future food.

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The co-living project - One Shared House 2030

As the continuing rising of global population, co-living is growing in popularity in major cities such as London and New York. Shared living will become increasingly attractive to millions of people as they struggle to find adequate and affordable housing in cities in the years to come.

SPACE 10 started this project to discuss how people would like to live together and explore people’s willing of possession share, One Shared House 2030 seeks to inform better design decisions when creating future living spaces, by taking people’s preferences and concerns into consideration before drawing the blueprint of how we might live tomorrow.

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IKEA Place - Bridging the imagination gap with AR

In the summer of 2017, augmented reality became one of opportunities with Apple’s iPhone X and also create an approach for IKEA to reach their customers. Today, not everyone is on the doorstep of an IKEA store, and nearly 40 percent of people deal with an “imagination gap”: a lack of confidence in taking risks regarding changes in their homes. With AR, people are no longer just looking at their screens, they’re looking through them. Lifestyle image would bring people deeper into the browsing experience, whereas an image of a product on white would lead to placing it in AR. This was the first opportunity to truly embrace the design advantages augmented reality offers: instead of having to explain or display the usual information that would come with an IKEA product, it could now let people experience it. #