5 Cool Things You Didn’t Know About IKEA’s Danish Innovation Lab

As the IKEA website says: ‘At home’ isn’t just a place. It’s a feeling. Like being in the most comfortable space in the universe. So for us, understanding people’s life at home is the most natural place to start. Every year, we visit homes all around the world to find out what people dream about. We then pair their needs with the abilities of our s

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We’re at the dawn of something big and unknown. New technologies are shaping the future in ways we haven’t even thought of yet. Some of them will have extraordinary benefits, while others, through unforeseen capabilities or even sinister intentions, may have unwanted consequences. But as designers, it’s up to us to explore them early, dive into th

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Taking on a holistic approach to design and systems’ thinking can help us understand how different elements relate to each other — and helps us remember that the world is an interconnected web. Everything we design is part of a whole that has a wider social and ecological impact.

But IKEA’s extensive research can influence product development only so much. Because IKEA’s business model depends on volume, they can’t change their products for different markets. It’s essential, therefore, that the in-store room displays fit each country’s culture. A bedroom in Japan might feature tatami mats and the earthquake beams that go th

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Design has evolved to meet the challenge of the new relationship between people and the material goods they need. Today, designers — artisans, manufacturers, engineers, architects — think far beyond the way things look. Comparing pre-industrial design to post-industrial design with a picture is absurd. Critiquing a modern object based on its appear... See more

‘When I look back over the last 25 years, in some ways what seems most precious is not what we have made but how we have made it and what we have learned as a consequence of that,’ he says. ‘I always think that there are two products at the end of a programme; there is the physical product or the service, the thing that you have managed to make, an

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