The team experimenting with Ikea’s next moves
AT WORK AND PLAY WITH IKEA’S SECRET DESIGN DISRUPTORS
kaave pour is not an obvious person to head up a project on the future of the automobile industry and urban mobility. For a start, he doesn’t have a driving licence. And second, he admits he doesn’t know much about cars and he’s not especially interested in them: Pour was born and lives in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the bicycle is king. Moreover, he’s 28 years old, and he thinks there’s a generational dimension. “It’s computers or phones that are more important for young people today than getting a car,” says Pour, who today wears a capacious white T-shirt with Nike and Adidas logos side by side on the front. “In my parents’ day, the goal was to buy a car. Now the goal is to get the newest iPhone.”
Still, at least he’s no hostage to entrenched wisdom. Pour is a co-founder and managing director of Space10, a “future-living lab” that is bankrolled by the Swedish homewares behemoth Ikea. When he and his colleagues decided to reimagine autonomous vehicles — the look and the purpose of them, rather than the technology, which they admit is beyond their pay grade — the first thing they did was to type “car of the future” into Google images. The results were muscular and metallic, swooping lines and aggressive haunches. The Batmobile, basically. Pour found the projections sterile and not very human or, his word, “erotic”.
“Let’s be honest, this is not a future I think many people would strive to live in,” he notes. “The writer Monica Byrne says she feels that futurism is like a bunch of bald, white men who want to live till they are 400 in glass houses. This is something generally at Space10 that we would like to fight, this perception that the future needs to be science-fiction.”
Space10 is sometimes described as Ikea’s “secret innovation lab”; Ikea itself has a story on its own website from 2016 calling it that, which seems like the exact opposite of what you’d do if you really didn’t want anyone to know about it. And, in a short amount of time, Space10 has made quite some impact: it has scandalously redesigned Ikea’s signature meatball, created a world-leading augmented reality app and done deep dives into low-cost modular housing, artificial intelligence and vertical farming. Its research has been showcased at the London Design Museum and last year it was on the shortlist for Fast Company’s Design Company of the Year (it narrowly lost out to Google).
So yes, not so secret then. Moreover, the building we’re sitting in couldn’t be harder to miss. It’s bang in the middle of Copenhagen’s meatpacking district, an industrial quarter now overrun with restaurants, craft-beer producers and bike shops. The site Space10 took over in 2015 used to be a fish-distribution centre, made up of cooling systems and large tanks of lobsters and the like. “It smelled like shit,” admits Pour. “We never thought we’d get rid of the smell.” They did and it’s now three floors of bright, versatile nooks, full of monstera plants, limited-edition Ikea pieces and young, attractive staff. Still, a nod is made to the original purpose of the building: vast, floor-to-ceiling windows allow anyone passing by to look in. It’s still a fish bowl in other words. Not since the insane MI6 building on the River Thames has a supposedly clandestine headquarters been so conspicuous.
But then you don’t have to spend long inside Space10 to realise that being different is a point of pride. Amazon’s innovation department, Lab126, for example, has more than 3,000 employees. Ikea’s equivalent is a more boutique affair: just two dozen staff, give or take. On most of its projects, Space10 brings in external collaborators: this allows it to work faster, it finds, and more efficiently and esoterically.
“Are you familiar with Ocean’s Eleven?” asks Simon Caspersen, another of the original four co-founders of Space10, and its communications director. “It’s a bit like that. If we are to make this heist, we need this expertise and this kind of skill. And if we just had to draw on the expertise we had in-house, there would be a lot of heists we couldn’t do.”
There are no fingerprint scanners here; no non-disclosure agreements. And among the designers, writers and makers you might expect, there’s also a chef, a documentary filmmaker and a clinical psychologist. Throwing a person who has never driven a car at a project about what vehicles should look like is straight from the Space10 playbook. “The entire method for this place is unique compared to other innovation labs, or whatever you want to call them,” says Caspersen, who is 35, which is avuncular, even ancient, by Space10’s youthful standards (he describes his role as “the annoying guy with the questions”). He has gingery-blond, gravity-defying hair, and a goofy sense of humour. “If we were a classic innovation lab and if Ikea was any other company, then what it would want us to do is look at its current business and say how it could improve. How can we innovate? But that is not the starting point. We start with the world: what are the big challenges we’re facing as humans and what are the emerging trends that potentially could empower people in new ways?
“We try to find patterns in the chaos,” Caspersen goes on. “But we don’t look for solutions for Ikea, we look for solutions for humanity. And then say, ‘OK, is that something that could be relevant for Ikea to actually solve?’ Which just gives us a completely different perspective.”
Hence Space10 turning its attention to selfdriving vehicles. Ikea is not in the car business. It has no aspirations to enter that market. So why have Pour and his colleagues spent almost a year envisaging seven different projections for what might happen if Ikea did one day take an interest in driverless cars? For at least two reasons, argues Pour.
“When the smartphone came in it changed everything, also for Ikea, even though it doesn’t make phones,” he says. “What we are exploring is what will be the indirect consequences of new technologies coming that we, as Space10, should be aware of, since it will change people’s everyday life. That doesn’t mean Ikea should go out and make phones. It should just understand people’s lives are changing because of that technology. The same will go for mobility: it will change the way we live in our cities, the way companies will operate and serve people, but there will probably also come a lot of stuff we couldn’t imagine. Like the first phone apps were weather apps, or a fake beer you could drink. Now we build Uber and Instagram: huge, billion-people platforms.”
The second reason is more fun. “The other part is that Ikea is a small-space-living expert,” says Pour. “And if you don’t have to drive, you don’t need a steering wheel, you maybe don’t even need to wear a seat belt, you can sleep in them, what do you do then? Nobody knows.”
Pour and Caspersen spend a couple of hours talking me through their research and their propositions, which are collected in a project they call “Spaces on Wheels”. They have brought undeniable rigour, intelligence and imagination to the field. The Space10 way is not to compile a written dossier, McKinsey-style, which quickly languishes unread and irrelevant. It instead prefers eye-catching visuals that will spark debate and media discussion. And there is an underlying logic to its work on autonomous vehicles. If cars do become “spaces” where you could work, drink a coffee, play Red Dead Redemption 2, who would you trust more to design their interiors: Ikea or, say, Renault?
Still, if you are a sceptical, cynical sort, there is something about Space10 that is, if not troubling, then perplexing. Ikea might greet you with a cheery “Hej!” but in many, key ways it is not a whimsical company. In pursuit of the “better everyday life for the many people”, it drives its designers and suppliers hard. It is also not immune to financial concerns: last November, Ingka, the holding company that runs the vast majority of Ikea stores, announced that pre-tax profits for its main operations were down 36 per cent to £1.8bn.
In this light, should we accept that Space10 represents a radical gamble aimed at preempting the future and creating new commercial opportunities? Or is it a publicity-generating offshoot intended to make noise and send a signal that, after 76 years in the game, Ikea can still lead the way in innovative thinking?
When I raise this doubt with Caspersen, he’s not offended or surprised. “That’s a good question,” he agrees.
‘WE TRY AND FIND PATTERNS IN THE CHAOS,’ SAYS SIMON CASPERSEN, A SPACE10 CO-FOUNDER. ‘WE DON’T LOOK FOR SOLUTIONS FOR IKEA, WE LOOK FOR SOLUTIONS FOR ALL HUMANITY’
space10 did not have especially auspicious beginnings. It can be traced to a collaboration between Ikea and Copenhagen design studio Rebel Agency that led in 2014 to a furniture collection called Bråkig. The dazzling geometric-prints pieces were instant hits, selling out all over Europe, and Ikea asked Carla Cammilla Hjort, the founder of Rebel Agency, and her colleague Caspersen, to work on another project.
Caspersen recalls: “I was in Palestine making
a documentary film when Carla called saying they would like to meet again. And I was like, ‘To be honest, I’m not interested in designing more furniture, that’s not my aspiration.’ And she said, ‘Neither am I.’ But then we thought, ‘What if we just meet them and pitch what we dream about doing for them?’ And then if they say, ‘no’, we can go back to being happy. And if, ‘yes’, it’ll be what we dream about doing.”
Hjort and Caspersen’s pitch was a riff on Ikea’s promise to improve the lives of the masses. They didn’t want to get bogged down in store signage or cashless tills; their focus would be on the biggest problems the world faces — overpopulation, climate change, sustainability. And they had some conditions. First, they wanted this new lab to be completely independent of Ikea. They could not be based in-house at the company, and they would not accept briefs from its management team.
“And they were up for that,” says Caspersen, still sounding surprised. “So after a six-hour meeting, we ended up hugging and high-fiving the CEO and said, ‘Let’s do this!’”
Hjort and Caspersen were joined by Pour, an entrepreneur who began nefariously hacking bookmakers when he was a teenager, and a French innovation strategist, Guillaume CharnyBrunet. Space10 settled on Copenhagen — somewhere between Älmhult in Sweden, the spiritual home of Ikea, and Leiden in the Netherlands, its current headquarters — as its base. Immediately, the founders unveiled a series of conceptual products aimed at reducing energy consumption and improving health and wellbeing in urban environments. These included a “smART” wall hanging that changed colour depending on how much water and electricity were being used in the home, and a Cloud
Burst monitor that could be mounted in the shower and would tell you when you’ve spent an ecologically acceptable amount of time under the nozzle.
The response to the prototypes was positive, but the founders of Space10 all realised they had made a misstep. “We were like, ‘This could be an Ikea product’, but the shower is also the last place we have left in our daily life where we don’t have technology integrated,” says Caspersen. “It’s the only place we’re alone basically, without any screaming babies or screaming wives or anything. Not even our smartphone is available. So we then started looking at, ‘OK, how much water do we actually save using this?’ And then we found out that just a hamburger takes over 2,000 litres to produce. That’s three months of showering.
“So instead of coming up with Protestantism cold-shower solutions,” he continues, “where we have to suffer to do the right thing, let’s actually look at our food-production system, instead of looking at faucets. Then we just closed down the project and said, ‘We need to look at food instead’.”
Space10’s second project did exactly that. Called “Tomorrow’s Meatball”, it proposed eight dishes that we could be eating in the “nottoo-distant future”: these included a crispy bug ball, a wonderful waste ball and an artificial meatball, made from lab-grown beef. It also introduced what would become Space10’s visual signature: stark, colourful images and short text, for maximum visual impact. “Tomorrow’s Meatball” went viral, with media coverage from design blogs to the Mail Online, which twisted the story to announce that Ikea was considering removing meatballs from their menu out of environmental concerns.
“Suddenly, we had kidnapped one of its most valuable brand assets: the meatball,” smirks Caspersen. “So I thought we were going to be shut down, because we hadn’t asked permission from anyone at Ikea to release the project. There was a lot of, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Ikea UK had so many journalists reaching out to them and they had no idea. We were talking about insect meatballs and stuff like that, and these guys serve over 600m people a year in their restaurants. This is big business. So, of course, they were like, ‘Why are you talking about lab-grown meat and insects in our food? Are you trying to damage the brand?’”
Really Ikea didn’t have a clue what Space10 was working on? “No,” replies Caspersen. “But that was also a way for us to say: the agreement is that Space10 is independent and external. So we sort of tested that, but then the story just went much bigger than we anticipated.”
He shakes his head and continues, “But then it really, really liked the project. And the CEO once told me, ‘The day you don’t provoke us anymore is the day we don’t need you anymore’. So we try to constantly push and give different perspectives. It’s a fun position to be in.”
But again here you could counter: isn’t this exercise primarily a publicity stunt? “Smart” taps are rejected by Space10 for being too ordinary; meatballs made of insects are not going to feature on an Ikea menu any time soon.
But that criticism misses the point, argues Caspersen. Ikea might not immediately sell a crispy bug ball, but in September 2018, it did launch a new vegan hot dog, with ingredients that included kale, ginger, red lentils and carrots, topped with pickled red cabbage and crunchy onions. The carbon footprint of the new dog is dramatically lower than the regular one, introduced back in 1981.
“What we’re doing with the meatballs is getting people a little more familiar with something very unfamiliar,” says Caspersen. “Just to trigger some thoughts and start some discussions. So I don’t think I’m going to eat crickets in 10 years’ time as the most natural thing. But I could be wrong. When sushi came to Denmark everybody was like, ‘Eating raw fish? That sounds disgusting!’ But then suddenly it was actually quite delicious and it caught on. So who will know?”
Another example is a project that Space10 did on vertical gardens. In 2017, it turned the basement of its Copenhagen offices into “a little farm” that could produce fresh salads and vegetables year-round hydroponically under artificial lamps, using 90 per cent less water than normal. It used what it grew in staff lunches and gave some to local restaurants. It also took the concept on the road, setting up a café in Shoreditch for the 2017 London Design Festival. Over six days, it served more than 2,000 bowls of microgreens, all grown on site. Over
a month later it was announced that Ikea had made a significant investment in AeroFarms, the US company that runs the world’s largest vertical farm.
Was Space10 responsible for Ikea’s hook up with AeroFarms? “We’ll never know,” says Caspersen, gnomically. But then he points out that Ikea is trialling prototypes of a new style of café in their stores with salad leaves grown on site: “And it looks exactly like the one we had in London — at least the design of it.”
At this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Ikea partnered with British designer Tom Dixon to create a hydroponic garden that grows “hyper-natural edibles”, and again there is a strong similarity to Space10’s project.
Challenging Ikea and the element of surprise obviously remains important to Space10. When I first went to its offices in August last year, it was a fortnight before the launch of Spaces on Wheels. After the meatballs fiasco, surely Ikea had been briefed on this one?
“Not yet, no,” laughed Caspersen. “I actually really wanted to do it before we met with you, but at this moment they have no clue. They could think that we are crazy and I might call you up and say, ‘Tim, I owe you an apology. There’s no announcement.’ We’ll see.”
“tomorrow’s meatballs” and “spaces on Wheels” are what Space10 calls “playful research”. Another project that would fall into this category is its cookbook, Future Food Today, which was published in Europe in April. Among the recipes are also instructions for how to build a “small bioreactor” at home, so you can grow your own spirulina: a blue-green algae that is extremely digestible, rich in vitamins and antioxidants, and which is believed to be the most complete food source in nature.
Space10 also does work that Pour and Caspersen describe, perhaps not officially, as “boring research”. This, for example, might be an investigation into solar energy and blockchain, and how these technologies might help the 1.1bn people on the planet without reliable access to electricity. These endeavours do not get the juices going for articles such as these, but they pay the bills for Space10 and it is in these areas where you start to see the immediate value it offers Ikea.
It was one of these pieces of boring research that in 2017 led to the launch of Ikea Place, its augmented reality app. You may have experienced Ikea Place already: since it was unveiled, it has been the most popular non-game, augmented reality app, and number two on the charts even when you take games into account. In simple terms, it allows you to drop virtual furniture from the Ikea range into your own home and see how it looks through your smartphone screen. It’s a neat concept, but also a very useful one: Apple’s CEO Tim Cook — or Tim Apple, as he shall forever be known — has credited it with “changing the whole experience of how you shop for, in this case, furniture and other objects that you can place around the home”. At a time when Ikea faces its most challenging period in its long history, its popularity is a big deal.
Everyone agrees that there was an element of good fortune involved. Ikea has been tinkering with 3D models for a while: its first computer-generated product image, a Bertil chair, appeared in its autumn 2006 catalogue; by 2009, it was creating whole room sets from their huge database of 3D models (today, most of the Ikea catalogue is photorealistic compositions rather than actual photographs). The company became so skilled that even Pixar called it in for an idea exchange.
Meanwhile, Space10 had been investigating a series of speculative projects based on augmented reality. “We thought the technology wouldn’t be ready within the next three to four years,” admits Caspersen. “But then suddenly” — in June 2017, at its Worldwide Developer Conference — “Apple releases its ARKit and overnight a billion smartphones have AR capabilities. To be part of the launch of that, we had an opportunity to design something using ARKit. So in nine weeks, we designed Ikea Place.”
Ikea Place landed in September 2017, initially with a limited range of furniture and products. It was a mad rush for Space10 to get the app in working order, but it didn’t sacrifice subtlety. One of the many satisfying details comes when you drop a piece of furniture into the spot you want it: there is a barely audible clunk and a little judder through your phone known as haptic feedback. The noises were a bespoke creation by Plan8 Music, a Swedish sound studio, and vary depending on the size and weight of the item you are trying out. Ultimately, Ikea will have more than 10,000 products from its catalogue on the Place app; it may also allow you to scan an object from the real world and — through visual AI — direct you to the closest approximation in the Ikea line-up.
For Ikea, Space10’s work on just the Place app alone justifies its existence, Torbjörn Lööf, the 53-year-old chief executive of Inter Ikea, tells me over the phone early one morning. “The money we spend on that — on Space10, so to speak — for the totality, the return on investment from a financial point of view is more than done within just one case,” he says. “And then the beauty is that we don’t know what will come.”
Ikea has an unusual structure: broadly speaking it’s a franchise model, and Inter Ikea is a holding company that controls the intellectual property of the designs. Put simply, Lööf has been in charge of overall strategy since
ONE PIECE OF THE FIRM’S RESEARCH LED IN 2017 TO THE LAUNCH OF THE IKEA PLACE APP, ALLOWING IKEA FURNITURE TO BE DROPPED INTO YOUR OWN HOME TO SEE HOW IT LOOKS THROUGH YOUR PHONE SCREEN
May 2015. One of his early initiatives was the creation of Space10 in November of that year, which he felt could bring a dynamism to Ikea that it needed.
“I felt there was a lack of innovation capabilities and new thinking,” says Lööf. “We have great competences in Ikea, great people, a lot of innovators, but everyone is part of a big corporation and Space10 represented another generation, another way of thinking, and it had a completely different network — even back then.”
Lööf agrees with Space10’s Caspersen that the relationship has had its rocky moments, especially early on. “One of the first things they did was the Ikea meatball exercise, the bug ball and all of that,” says Lööf, with a chuckle. “And it got a lot of media attention, of course, and we were low-key internally with the communication in Ikea. So in the beginning it was very challenging and it still is, you know. But then you have to understand that they are pushing the boundaries and they are visionaries. They put themselves ahead and we invest in those exploration cases. And they get hold of some of the best talents I have ever met.
“Oh, I view our collaboration as a great success,” Lööf goes on. “It’s more successful than I imagined from the beginning.”
when space10 finishes a project, it usually throws a party at its headquarters in Copenhagen. It opens up the ground floor of its offices and makes around 200 tickets available — first come, first served. There are talks and a free bar. A month after our first meeting, I return for the launch of Spaces on Wheels, at which the key speakers will be Space10 managing director Kaave Pour and a pair of designers from the Berlin-based agency Foam Studio who specialise in 3D that Space10 brought in to help it with this particular “heist”.
“People say, ‘Why share so much? You’re an innovation lab, why not keep your research to yourself ?’” says Simon Caspersen. “I really like this quote from Mike Tyson: ‘Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’ We can constantly get feedback on our ideas, instead of spending three years developing something and finding out, ‘We haven’t thought about this because we’re sitting in our bubble in Copenhagen.’ So this way, our ideas can get a lot of punches and we can see, ‘OK, which one is still standing after that round?’ And maybe there is something interesting there.
“We have plenty of projects that don’t go the way we anticipate them,” Caspersen adds. “And we can kill them much faster.”
It’s an uncharacteristically balmy autumn day (“Way too warm,” sighs Caspersen, conflicted), and as he waits for guests to arrive, he stands on the street outside Space10, smoking. High up on one of the buildings opposite is an old statue of a cow and someone has sprayed underneath it: “Meat is murder”. Now, however, someone else has crossed out “murder” and written “delicious”. Caspersen does not seem the anxious type, but this has been a long, involved project for Space10 — it has run for almost a year, rather than three or four months, which is the standard — and he’s clearly curious how it will be received.
There’s already been some online coverage and the initial response is positive. “It’s created a lot of excitement so far,” Caspersen says. “We heard from our media analyst agency that it reached 17m people yesterday. I got an email from Associated Press asking if we were planning on prototyping them in Copenhagen. If we had any concerns around vandalism. And I had to explain to her — she’s a really nice lady — that these are not actual cars. It’s more conceptual.”
Seventeen million people in one day isn’t a bad start, I say. “The interesting part of working with Ikea is the scale of it,” replies Caspersen. “Coming up with ideas, if then we suddenly reach five million people, it’s a terrible project. It needs to be bigger!”
Not being car designers or manufacturers, Space10 realised early on that it would need a different way to showcase the results of its playful research. So how do you present a new car if you don’t have a physical object? Space10 decided that it could adapt the augmentedreality technology that it had used so effectively with Ikea Place. This time, instead of placing a sofa in your living room, an app would allow you to order one of seven Spaces on Wheels on your smartphone, much like you would request an Uber. The virtual car would then drive up to where you were standing and you could watch it arrive on your screen.
Caspersen thumbs his phone — the app is only supported by iOS mobile devices right now — and we discuss which of the spaces to order. There’s the hotel on wheels for long journeys where you might want to catch up on some shut-eye, or an imagined farm on wheels that brings healthy, fresh produce direct from the fields to your doorstep. There’s also an office, café, mobile doctor’s surgery, a playroom for gaming and a pop-up shop that is decked out in Ikea blue and yellow and filled with a selection of its products. All of the vehicles are envisioned to be electric and autonomous, so no driver is required.
We settle on the café on wheels, and the screen informs us it will arrive in around two
SPACE10 APPROACHES THE WORLD’S PROBLEMS WITH HUMOUR, A STRONG MORAL CODE AND AN OPTIMISM THAT COMES FROM HAVING THE WORLD’S MOST INFLUENTIAL DESIGN COMPANY IN ITS CORNER
minutes. We watch as a flashing blob navigates the twisty, decidedly car-unfriendly streets of central Copenhagen. Caspersen notes that the average person driving to work in a busy city spends 75 minutes commuting, and half an hour might be lost to congestion. Over the course of 30 years, the driver will spend over a year stuck in traffic. Originally, the café was going to be a mobile bar: “But we thought that drinking and driving could convey the wrong message,” says Caspersen.
Then, through the screen of the phone, it pulls up at the pavement beside us. It is appealing to look at: all rounded corners, muted tones and stripped of the muscularity (and masculinity) we expect from a new car launch. It has a coffee machine at one end and some window boxes filled with plants along the side. There are some parallels to the car that Homer designed in a 1991 “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” episode of The Simpsons — namely the bubble dome and the built-in entertainment system — but as we look around it, virtually, it’s possible to imagine whiling away a very pleasant half-hour in here as you tootle from A to B. The bald, white guy who wants to live to be 400 in his glass house? He would probably hate it.
And — even though Caspersen and Space10 might affect disinterest — it turns out that paymaster, Torbjörn Lööf, loves the project. Ikea, under his guidance, is a company in transition. It has achieved huge success and profitability, but it’s current model is starting to show the creaks and scratches of a decade-old Billy bookcase.
Lööf, who has worked for Ikea for 30 years in a variety of roles, knows the challenges well. He wants to make Ikea products affordable in emerging markets such as India and China. He has ambitious goals for reducing the company’s climate footprint and increasing its use of renewable and recycling materials. He needs to overhaul the traditional big-blue-box-on-theoutskirts-of-the-city model that has served Ikea so well, but which is existentially threatened by online shopping and increased urbanisation.
“Innovation is a key capability in order to develop Ikea and to reach the goals we have set out,” says Lööf. “So I see Space10 as a very important capability. We have many different capabilities, but this is one and it’s a very important one. It’s also a unique capability. It’s something that maybe is possible to set up inside a company, but personally I doubt that it would ever be successful. I think it would be dragged into the normal operation and daily business, and all the problems and dilemmas that come with that.
“Part of the beauty,” Lööf continues, “is that we don’t know what it will give us.”
There is something comforting, even inspiring, about spending time at Space10. It can at points feel like hanging out with a kid with ADHD: a conversation that starts on CCTV jumps to the decline of street food in China via the pros and cons of children growing up in communes. But it approaches the world’s problems with humour, a strong moral code and an optimism that comes from having the world’s most influential design company in its corner. If it does happen to hit on something, its work has the capacity to impact millions, if not billions, of people around the planet.
On the street in Copenhagen, the sun dips behind the buildings, and there’s a sound of beer bottles being opened inside: the party is about to start. “We believe that nobody can predict the future, but anybody can shape it,” says Caspersen. “Focusing on how we can drastically improve the lives of the many people, that sparks a lot of inspiration in making something that is valuable for both Ikea and the world.” He stubs out his cigarette, “At least that’s the ambition.”
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