The man behind Ikea’s designs,
Q&A > MARCUS ENGMAN, DESIGN MANAGER OF IKEA OF SWEDEN
In addition to products such as the Billy bookcase, which has changed little over time, Ikea comes up with hundreds of new items every year. Marcus Engman, design manager of Ikea of Sweden, describes how they do it.
How difficult is it to come up with fresh, innovative designs that are ahead of the curve at a time when so many people have a vital interest in design?
If you are a curious person or a curious company, you come up with ideas all the time. Every idea you see here at Ikea, it has at least 50 ideas that we have left behind. If we do a collection out here that ends up with 30 items, it started with 250 ideas. It’s a way of working for us, we call it a fun funnel, actually, starting off with a lot of crazy ideas and then funnel it down to something which is valid and good.
Ikea does home visits with customers. What did you learn from your last visit?
I was in Hong Kong before Christmas. It was very small apartments all over the island. A really big problem for them was how do you take care of your laundry when you live in 35 square metres and you don’t have a balcony? They had nice sofas, nice textiles, but at the end of the day, they had to dry their laundry on all of it. Maybe that is a business opportunity for us. Maybe that is something to solve.
Home visits are conducted all over the world. Are there any challenges that are universally shared?
One of the things is the sense of clutter and all of the things that you want to organize. That is a common thing all over the world. People have a tendency to have too many things and you want to organize them in some way, so storage is really important and how you store and what you store.
Wireless charging furniture went to market in August. Another product innovation we saw was a countertop that suggests recipes based on what products you put on the counter. Is that just an idea or something that could come to fruition?
We have started working in a different way with some of our product development. Working with home furnishing in the past has been incremental steps, more or less — you get one thing and you make it a little bit better — but now we have started out working with setting up concepts instead, more like the car industry for instance, they do concept cars. Those cars will never appear, but you take all of the learnings from out of that concept car and put that into production afterwards. So it’s daring to make giant leaps in thought to get a faster way of creating really new stuff. So that is what you see with the concept kitchen. I don’t think that you’re going to see the complete concept kitchen as it is, but we are going to take parts of it that we have developed there and ideas and develop that for future kitchens within Ikea.