“Throughout this past year, technology played its most vital role in keeping us connected to our families, our work, our hobbies. At times we felt enabled by technology, other times it felt hard to escape. At IKEA, home should always be about people first. By letting technology into our homes, we wanted to explore how it can be part of our everyday lives, while making sure we still feel safe and free in our spaces. And it is important for us at IKEA that we place high value on privacy and preserving the boundaries between public and private.”
— Fredrik Axén, Digital Manager, Inter IKEA Systems B.V (worldwide IKEA franchisor).
This is the second series of digital experiments under the umbrella of Everyday Experiments (the first series of experiments was launched in June 2020), exploring the role of technology in the home and take the everyday and make it extraordinary. Conducted by some of the world’s most innovative design and technology studios, the experiments focus on AI, Machine Learning, Augmented Reality and Spatial Intelligence.
“I have read and understood the terms conditions” is perhaps the most commonly disregarded phrase on the internet, but what if we had a virtual buddy at home that could alert us to when data was shared without permission? Imagine that devices on a wifi network were realized in augmented reality as creatures and characters living in our house. What if sound bubbles acted as partitions to be freely added, contracted, and expanded to allow more privacy and personal space? What if the objects you own could share their entire history with you? The new experiments aim to bring transparency to our use of technology, and even help safeguard us from it.
— Georgina McDonald, Lead Design Producer, SPACE10
Through projects with forward-thinking collaborators, SPACE10 and IKEA aim to design innovative solutions for tomorrow by sparking discussions and challenging conventions through new collaborations between technology studios. Here are the collaborators and their experiments:
Sound Bubbles by Yuri Suzuki
Sound Bubbles would allow you to construct silent zones of privacy within the home using spatial audio. Now, more than ever, we find ourselves using the home for a myriad of activities. A living room becomes an office; a kitchen becomes a call center. Such a constant presence of activity challenges our sense of privacy, not only regarding personal space but also sound. Using a tablet, the experiment envisions that you can scan your room and create a zone of localised silence in any given area.
Chain of Traceability by Field.io
Combining blockchain technology with augmented reality to create digital twins of everyday objects, Chain of Traceability would let you visualise product knowledge in an entirely new dimension. By registering a household object on the blockchain, details about its production journey, components, materials and carbon footprint could be securely stored and shared. This would also allow people to make more informed choices when buying, selling, or discarding the object at hand.
Digital Buddy by Field.io
Digital Buddy would leverage artificial intelligence and augmented reality to create a 3D avatar to help protect your interests and privacy online. As third parties control more and more of our lives online, Digital Buddy would be a permanent companion – an entity independent of any brand or platform – performing with your best interest in mind. Someone to act as an advisor, providing guidance and breaking down the many complexities that come with living in an increasingly digital world.
Invisible Roomatest by Nicole He & Eran Hilleli
Invisible Roommates is an augmented reality application that would visualize how the devices in your home interacted with one another. The application would make use of existing technology to portray the different devices connected to your network as little living characters, playfully illustrating how these pieces of technology communicate and making it easier for you to understand what is happening in your home.
The new Privacy + Trust series was launch on the Everyday Experiments platform Everyday Experiments, on 26 May 2021. The website will continuously shift and grow to showcase technological and innovative design experiments that spark new ways of looking at our homes and spaces we live in.
* SPACE10 is a research and design lab on a mission to create a better everyday life for people and the planet, supported by and entirely dedicated to the IKEA Brand. SPACE10 operates independently to bring an outside-in perspective to the IKEA Brand. The role of SPACE10 is to qualify new opportunities, inform strategies, build new partnerships, and design new solutions to create a better everyday life for both people and the planet.
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About IKEA
IKEA offers well-designed, functional and affordable, high-quality home furnishing, produced with care for people and the environment. There are several companies with different owners, working under the IKEA Brand, all sharing the same vision: to create a better everyday life for the many people. IKEA was founded in Sweden in 1943.
About Inter IKEA Systems B.V.
Inter IKEA Systems B.V. is the worldwide IKEA franchisor, part of the Inter IKEA Group which besides Inter IKEA Systems B.V., also contains IKEA of Sweden AB, IKEA Supply AG and IKEA Industry AB related businesses. The IKEA retail business is operated through a franchise system with franchisees that are authorized to market and sell the IKEA product range within specified geographical territories. Inter IKEA Systems B.V. is the owner of the IKEA Concept and worldwide IKEA franchisor, who also assigns different IKEA companies to develop the product range, supply products and deliver communication solutions. Today, 12 different groups of companies have the right to own and operate IKEA sales channels under franchise agreements with Inter IKEA Systems B.V.
ABOUT FIELD.SYSTEMS
FIELD.SYSTEMS is a creative studio in London and Berlin. As artists, designers and consultants, they explore the aesthetics of the near future and how technology changes the way we live our lives – working with code and data, moving image and interaction, sculptural and spatial experiences.
ABOUT YURI SUZUKI
Yuri Suzuki is an experience and sound designer who works at the intersection of installation, interaction and product design. He joined Pentagram as a partner in 2018. His work encompasses sound, music, installations, product design, art direction, education and contemporary art for a range of clients across the world.
ABOUT NICOLE HE + ERAN HILLELI
Nicole He is an independent game developer and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, New York, who previously worked at Google Creative Lab, and as an outreach lead at Kickstarter. She's also an adjunct faculty member at ITP at NYU. Eran Hilleli is an artist and animation director at Hornet, art director at Klang Games, Lecturer at Bezalel academy of art and design and co-founder of Iorama Studio.
